[Carrot Cruncher]

I've recently rebuilt my XBMCbuntu media player with KodiBuntu. Everything is working fine with one exception.

I mainly use a MCE IR receiver (used with a MCE keyboard and remote) but also have various RF receivers (used with keyboard and mouse).

After booting everything works fine but after an undetermined period of time (sometime hours, sometime days) Kodi will stop responding to any keyboard input (both IR and RF). It continues to respond to remote and mouse input. If I switch to a console then the OS continues to respond to the keyboards.

The only way I can resolve the problem is to reboot and use the media player until the problem reoccurs.

I'm not sure if this is related to:
http://kodi.wiki/view/Helix_FAQ#LINUX:_M..._volume.29

but I can't work out how to unbind the keys on this distro.

Does anyone know if the symptom I've described is caused by OS key mapping, and if so, how I unmap the keys? Cheers.

[mutant_matt]

To back up your claim, and hopefully, to help us and others (in the long run, this might take quite some time to figure out! ), this forum post is the only thing I can find through much searching, that sounds exactly like my problem. I don't think it's the OS "stealing" "Media Keys" as for me, all keys stop working!

Some years back I had an ATOM ION based Xubuntu XBMC based build, built upon Xubuntu 12.04LTS running Frodo, with a Logitech K400 wireless keyboard/mouse combo plus a Harma MCE remote control with USB dongle. The dongle uses the kernel HID driver to emulate a keyboard so basically, the system (and therefore XBMC) thinks I have just a keyboard (well, perhaps, 2 x keyboards). All mapping in XBMC I have created just map keyboard key presses.

This setup works absolutely perfectly, from boot, until some random time in the future, often days, usually weeks or sometimes, months later. There is no pattern that I can spot, it just seems to stop reacting to key presses, randomly. I can recover it only by rebooting the box (though, next time, I really should try logging out, and into Xubuntu desktop to see if *that* accepts the keyboard (I guess I won't be able to login, if it doesn't). The mouse included in the K400 always continues to work, and I can use this to instruct XBMC/Kodi to reboot. The keyboard never comes back, no matter what I try. One other thing, if I ssh in and look at the log, the log is reporting no errors, and everything looks like it's working as per usual, you can even see all the key presses still being logged, so XBMC is "seeing" the key presses, but not acting upon them. Very strange.

I have upgraded Xubuntu 12.04/Frodo through to 14.04LTS including the Kernel enablement stack (kernel v3.16), Gotham (13.2) and now Isengard (15.2). I have also upgraded the ATOM ION to a Haswell i3 with NVIDIA GT740 and the problem has remained across all versions, builds and hardware changes, and XBMC and now KODI works perfectly, most of the time, other than this one random problem.

It's got to be a bug, as XBMC (now Kodi) is logging the key press events in the log, but the trouble is, when it happens, it's too late to enable debug logging, as that needs a restart, and that fixes the problem....

Thoughts, anyone?

Cheers,

Matt.