This repository contains ccf2pulse, a tool for extracting infrared pulse codes from old-school Pronto CCF files.
Back in the days, Philips produced a PDA like universal remote control called Pronto. Like any universal remote control the Pronto can also learn codes from other remote controls. For some reason, the Pronto and its file exchange format CCF was kind of popular.
Say your remote-control for your old HiFi/appliance/etc. device is broken. Or you obtained some device with the remote control missing. And - say - there isn't even any replacement commercially available, but you manage to hunt down some CCF file from somebody's homepage or some IR database site such as remotecentral.
So far, so good. But how to actually read that obscure proprietary CCF format?
ccf2pulse helps with that. It extracts the raw infrared pulses in an annotated text format for copy and pasting into other infrared code configurations.
Dump Codes:
./ccf2pulse.py xyz.ccf
[..]
Button: Down
Carrier: 40.24 kHz (0x67)
Header: 0000 0067 0000 0012
once (0 on/off pairs):
repeat (18 on/off pairs):
0017 0095 0017 0095 0097 0015
0097 0015 0017 0095 0017 0095
0017 0095 0017 0095 0017 0095
0017 0095 0017 0095 0017 0095
0017 0095 0017 0095 0097 0015
0097 0015 0097 0015 0097 041c
Rewrite to another carrier frequency:
./ccf2pulse.py xyz.ccf --rescale 38000
[..]
Button: Down
Carrier: 38.03 kHz (0x6d)
Header: 0000 006d 0000 0012
once (0 on/off pairs):
repeat (18 on/off pairs):
0015 008c 0015 008c 008e 0013
008e 0013 0015 008c 0015 008c
0015 008c 0015 008c 0015 008c
0015 008c 0015 008c 0015 008c
0015 008c 0015 008c 008e 0013
008e 0013 008e 0013 008e 03e2
Dump pulses using human readable units:
./ccf2pulse.py xyz.ccf --lirc | less
[..]
Button: Down
Carrier: 40.24 kHz (0x67)
Header: 0000 0067 0000 0012
once (0 on/off pairs, in µs, decimal):
repeat (18 on/off pairs, in µs, decimal):
571 3702 571 3702 3752 521
3752 521 571 3702 571 3702
571 3702 571 3702 571 3702
571 3702 571 3702 571 3702
571 3702 571 3702 3752 521
3752 521 3752 521 3752 26140
The Pronto CCF basically defines some buttons for a learned device, i.e. it defines the placement of some UI elements and the IR codes itself.
The codes are learned raw, i.e. each learned button is basically just a list of on/off pulse pairs. In a weird format, using weird units.
See the inline comments and format documentation in
ccf2pulse.py.
There is pronto2lirc but it can't read binary CCF files. Instead it refers to CCFTools/CCFDecompile which seem to have been windows-only tools, which I couldn't find online, anymore, as of 2022.
There is the tonto project which looks like it supports some kind of CCF extraction feature. However, it's kind of hard to say just by looking at the code. It's probably hard to get going since it was written in Java, decades ago, since the Java ecosystem changed much.
There is IrScrutinizer which is a Java GUI applications that supports importing/exporting into various IR code formats, including CCF and LIRC. Since it's written in Java, it isn't packaged by Linux distributions, probably either downloads half the internet via maven and/or requires trusting many unpackaged dependencies I haven't tried it.
The LIRC project has a huge IR remote control database in a much more sane format than CCF. Besides raw codes it also supports more semantic/structured codes (such as NEC) which are more compact and easier to reason about. But even when using raw codes, the LIRC format is more useful, since the pulses are specified in microseconds.
However, unfortunately, the LIRC project looks kind of dead, nowadays. For example, the last remote control configuration was added in 2018.
When targeting microcontrollers, there are several Arduino open source libraries for decoding and transmitting IR codes, such as IRLib2 and IRremote that can also deal with raw codes.