Larry's Club Cars <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> says: > With a wireless keyboard and wireless mouse > in the frontend, do I really need a remote control?
I too have a wireless keyboard, but still bought myself a learning remote. A keyboard is nice for many MythTV-related tasks, and very efficient in many ways, but it just can't replace the convenience of sitting back on a comfortable chair navigating the frontend with one thumb. At the same time, a remote can't replace the convenience of a keyboard in simple things like entering letters and words. I made sure to get an IR keyboard/mouse so I could teach the codes to my remote; this way I haven't had to bother with lirc. I bought an ACK-581 (<URL:http://www.directron.com/ack581.html>). Positives include: * The keyboard and integrated mouse thumbpad work well, and at the end of the day that's what counts. Two PS/2 cables snake out of the IR receiver, so no compatibility worries about USB keyboards under Linux, as the KnoppMyth people warn against (although I'm using Fedora Core 4). * The black color goes well with the rest of my entertainment setup (although, naturally, the big-screen flat panel I've ordered only comes in silver). Beige is also available. * LinEAK's xosd plugin givss me nice-looking on-screen feedback for the multimedia keys. Negatives include: * Since seemingly few have heard of this model before, it's not supported out-of-the-box by LinEAK. It's not hard to add support with some perusing of LinEAK's documentation, but still an annoyance considering just how many keyboards LinEAK *does* support. * Not all the multimedia keys generate xev-visible keycodes out of the box; I had to write a little shell script to generate them with setkeycodes after figuring out the proper ones with the LinEAK documentation. (Mysteriously, following said steps, the Mute and Volume Up keys generated the same keycodes, meaning I had to reassign Volume Up to a vacant keycode.) Sometimes, for some reason I can't figure out, the new keycodes disappear and I have to rerun the shell script. I thus set up a cron entry to regenerate them regularly. * If an IR signal gets cut off or garbled mid-keystroke (if, say, the line of sight gets interrupted while typing), the last-typed key is liable to continue to repeat endlessly until I push another key. I'm not sure if this is a quirk of this keyboard or the way the x86 keyboard signaling architecture in general is designed. My learning remote is the fabled URC MX-500. Its price has come down a *lot* recently; mine was only $80 or so from Amazon.com. Positives include: * Enormous flexibility. I won't go into the remote's many virtues in detail; see the lengty review at <URL:http://www.remotecentral.com/mx500/> for more detail. Let's just say the remote can do pretty much anything you'd ever want an IR-based remote to do (with a couple of caveats that I'll get to), all with surprising ease of use, and that there's a reason it's been the king of super-programmable (yet still somewhat mass-market) remotes for years. Negatives include: * Size. It's big, even for a six-footer like me. Not a problem for me, and the remote and its keys all *feel* great, but those with small hands should be aware. * I can't figure out how to get taught keys to auto-repeat. The manual makes some vague mention of holding down the keys you teach to it on the source (the keyboard, in my case) in order to get the MX-500 to repeat, but for me that either does nothing or results in endlessly-repeating keys (no doubt with an identical cause to the similar issue I mentioned earlier regarding the keyboard). Why URC didn't enable the remote's keys to repeat automatically, without further effort, by holding keys down (or, perhaps, some setting to enable or disable repeating per key) I won't ever know. * I also can't figure out how to program keys with Shift-, Alt-, or Control-modifications (attempts to do so result in the modifiers often "sticking," again, no doubt related to the endless-repeating issue), although I suspect this is probably an issue with training any learning remote with a keyboard. Let me close the subject of remotes and keyboards with a puzzle. With the ATrpms MythTV packaging, I can't get the keystroke-editing function in Mythweb to work with the global keys section; any keys I put in there don't stick. Suggestions? -- Yeechang Lee <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> | +1 650 776 7763 | San Francisco CA US
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