Fixing multiple button presses being detected on IR remote on Linux when using evdev

Or: make your MCE remote work properly again on Kodi after upgrading to Ubuntu 18.04. No LIRC required.

Ever since I upgraded my Kodi box to Ubuntu 18.04, I’ve been having issues with my beloved remote control, the MCE remote from Microsoft. (I’ve had it for years, I have perfect muscle memory for all the buttons. All the most important buttons are within thumb reach.)

My remote, an MCE type 2

First, it wouldn’t work at all, and after some frustrating hours of problem shooting I got it sort-of, kind-of working, but it started repeating button presses, ignoring some buttons and generally being pretty useless. I eventually gave up on using the original IR receiver, and found that if I used a third party IR receiver acting like a HID device, I could tweak the keyboard bindings in Kodi to make it more or less feature complete.

That only left me with one annoyance: some buttons would register double presses. Worse, the all important «OK» button was one of them. Whenever I was navigating through my media, the double click would randomly start a movie I didn’t mean to, go to a season I didn’t intend etc. Changing options was also a big hassle, whenever I tried to toggle subtitles, they would generally un-toggle immediately.

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