IR Remote stops working with uPNP streaming

Help and Support Vero 4K / Vero 4K +
1

I’ve been working with Sam on a very odd problem and have decided to reach out and see if others are seeing the same issue. My setup is that I have some Vero 4K+, Raspberry Pi and Intel NUCs streaming via uPNP from a Mezzmo streaming server. The devices are a mix of gigabit Wthernet and wireless over the 5ghz band. Everything has been rock solid running new versions of OSMC for the Vero 4K+ devices and LibreElec 9.0.2 for the Raspberry Pis and NUCs.

My goal is to start replacing my Raspberry Pis with Vero 4K+ units to support 4K formats which Raspberry Pis are limited to 1080P. My Raspberry Pis are a mix of gigabit ethernet and wireless 5ghz. Up till now I have had my Vero 4K+ unis connected via gigabit Ethernet and all has been fine. I recently started testing Vero 4K+ replacement for a wireless connected Raspberry Pi. What I am seeing is that when I stream via uPNP to the Vero 4K+ over the 5ghz band the IR remote starts acting up with erratic behavior (multiple repeats of button presses, lack of response etc.) and after a few seconds it totally stops responding. The Vero wireless remote continues to work. When I stop the video the IR remote immediately starts working fine. If I take the same Vero 4K and plug it into Ethernet everything works fine.

I’ve tested this issue on multiple Vero 4Ks, including taking an existing unit off of Ethernet and connecting via 5ghz wireless The problem is consistent with uPNP streaming across 5ghz. I’ve tested 2 different IR remotes, a Harmony 650 and an HP Media Center, and both act identically.

Has anyone else seen this behavior ? Or does anyone else have a Mezzmo, Plezx or similar uPNP server they are streaming to Vero 4K+ unis across 5ghz with an IR remote ?

2

I’ve spent a few days working on this with Sam and have developed a workaround solution for now. The May release moved the IR receiver software from LIRC to ir-keytable but ir-keytable doesn’t appear to work with rc6 remote comtrols as configured in the May release. I have been able to get it working and my IR remote is rock solid now with no repeats, going to sleep etc. I’ve passed my findings onto Sam. ir-keytable is a much better solution than LIRC so this should make IR remotes better in the future.

3

From what we found out, you experienced problems with WiFi only.

Higher throughput, and in turn IRQs will cause time to be taken away from the lircd thread to service dhd threads.

There are some driver improvements that should provide better performance and mitigate this.

We still use LIRC for remote profiles as defined in My OSMC and we haven’t deployed ir-keytable by default yet. We include the package now to configure the repeat rate of input devices however.

In the future, we plan to deprecate LIRC profiles and add support for keytable configuration via My OSMC 2.0.

4

Thanks for the clarification regarding LIRC and helping me arrive at a stable solution. Based upon my usage of ir-keytable for over a week, it has been rock solid. I think folks will be very happy with OSMC moving in this direction.