[Howto] mceusb driver with lirc protocol instead of rc-6/devinput

[teekay]

Hi,

I'm brand new to XBian - really good work, guys. I migrated XBMC from my zaphod headed main box to a RPi (in order to get rid of the HDMI cable across the living room doorstep)

One thing that bugged me on the main box already back when I set it up was the fact that the LIRC devinput driver caused some laggyness with my mceusb receiver.

Hardware used:
- USB Formosa21 eHome Infrared Transceiver
- Logitech Harmony 650

Symptoms with devinput:
- first button press is ignored very often when the remote hasn't been used for some minutes/hours
- huge lags on key repeats every now and then

Solution:
Use mceusb driver with the lirc protocol instead of rc-6 via the input event layer.

This also fixes (see comments below):
- Microsoft MCE 1039 remote unmapped keys

These are the steps needed:

1. Edit /etc/lirc/hardware/custom.conf (this gets sourced by the main hardware.conf and takes precedence if at least one of the variables in there is uncommented and not empty)

Code:

#DRIVER="" # do _not_ set devinput here
DEVICE="/dev/lirc0"
MODULES="lirc_dev mceusb ir_lirc_codec"

echo lirc > /sys/class/rc/rc0/protocols

2. Edit /etc/lirc/lircd.conf and add at the top:

Code:

include "/etc/lirc/remotes/mceusb.conf"

3. Restart lirc and xbmc

Terminal

# service lirc restart
# service xbmc restart

Took me about an hour to find out how this needs to be set up in XBian. Dead simple, actually.
My remote feels a lot snappier now.

Hope it helps others with USB MCE receivers, too.