When I bought the Silverstone LC16M case for my home theater computer last year, I was excited about the built-in VFD and IR receiver, which was rumored to work with Linux. The iMon VFD/IR unit and remote control are manufactured by a company called Soundgraph and it turns out that they have no interest in helping out Linux users.

A guy called "Venky" has managed to cobble together some semi-functional drivers for the VFD/IR, but they fall short of actually being useful. The VFD control is the better of the two; Venky has written a driver for LCDProc that allows you to use the VFD in text mode only. This is OK, but you can't use it as an equalizer, which is one of the more interesting visual modes of the device (and works fine with the Soundgraph-supplied MCE-only drivers).

The more troublesome bit is the IR receiver and remote control. Instead of just digitizing the IR signal and passing it on, raw, to the operating system, the iMon unit decodes the signal and passes on the control codes to the OS. This means that it can only function with iMon remote controls. I've tried to get it to decode my TV remote, PS2 remote, and a handfull of "universal" remote controls that are lying around. I don't know what's different about the iMon transmission protocol that makes it unable to properly decode data from other remotes, because Soundgraph won't release the technical specs. There is exactly one remote control that works with the iMon other than the supplied remote: the Logitech Harmony 880/885, which retails for about $150. Geebus.

But wait... you can only get it to work with the iMon if you reprogram the VFD to accept slightly different timings. And you can only do that with the supplied drivers from Soundgraph, which only work on Windows. Great. So I'm stuck with their remote.

Now don't get me wrong, the iMon remote is actually one of the better remotes I've seen for a DVR, at least in terms of button layout and feature density. And it does work fine with the Linux driver for LIRC that Venky released. Unfortunately, the iMon's directional pad is actually set up to function as an analog stick rather than a digital direction pad, meaning that this portion doesn't work with LIRC. I've read some posts online that suggest that you can patch LIRC to get the direction pad to act as though it were digital, or to actually get the mouse functionality working—either of which would be fine with me—but neither patch seems to work with the current LIRC version.

So my HTPC has a remote with no direction buttons, which makes it awfully hard to navigate menus in MythTV. Furthermore, I can't use a universal remote with my home theater setup because nothing in existence will work with the HTPC and anything else. What a crock.

Of course, if Soundgraph would just release some technical specs for their hardware, people would have the utilities written in an instant to take care of all these problems. Soundgraph's hardware would suddenly become very attractive for the burgeoning Linux-based PVR market, they'd sell more product, and people who don't like the hideous limitations of MCE could make the machine they want to use rather than settling for something less.

People have made very well-written pleas to Soundgraph on the company forums, asking for an opportunity to provide free labor to them, write open-source Linux drivers for their hardware and allow the company to distribute the finished product on their website. They have gone unanswered by the forum admins in every case. I suspect that Soundgraph is actually in Microsoft's pocket, and MS sees Linux and MythTV as encroaching on its MCE profits. And if that's the case, it's really sad.