Steffen R
Streamzap USB Remote  

Using the Streamzap USB remote with vdr on FC5

After it got recommended in a german computer magazine, I bought this streamzap USB remote. It works perfectly well under WinXP, as well as it suits the needs of a Linux HTPC user. But since the lirc Kernel Modules are not in the mainstream Linux kernel yet, it took me some time to make this nice gadget work with my vdr. Due to the simple nature of my problems (and several similar entries in forums) I decided to document the process.
  1. Get the Kernel Modules
    To use that remote, you need to have the kernel modules lirc_dev.ko and lirc_streamzap.ko loaded. You can of course compile these along with your own kernel (some people say this is fun) but I personally prefer to have them installed as an rpm. To do that, You need to configure the ATRpms Repository for yum and after that install the lirc RPMs by typing
    yum install lirc lirc-kmdl-$(uname -r) lirc-lib lirc-devices
    If this had been successful, you'd probably be able to verify it like so 
    [root@vdr ~]# ls /lib/modules/$(uname -r)/updates/drivers/lirc/lirc_streamzap.ko
/lib/modules/2.6.17-1.2145_FC5/updates/drivers/lirc/lirc_streamzap.ko
  2. Configure lircd
    This is really easy :-) Just copy /usr/share/doc/lirc-0.?.?/remotes/streamzap/lircd.conf.streamzap to /etc/lircd.conf and you're done. You may now try and start the lirc daemon with the infamous
    service lircd start
    command. If you experience problems while loading those modules right after the installation, a reboot is probably the easiest way to make it work (You don't want to forget
    chkconfig lircd on
    , before doing that.)
  3. Make it work with vdr
    First of all: there is actually nothing left to do. In fact, you better don't do what seemed logical to me. I made the mistake of installing the vdr-remote plugin, because I thought the remote plugin was needed for a remote to work. Wrong! The vdr-remote Plugin is only needed if you want to use the onboard (av7110_ir) capabilities of some cards. lirc support is built into vdr. So just restart your vdr service and your remote will work just fine (at least it did for me) and confront you with the learning mode in the OSD at the first time.