Hardy + XBMC + Apple remote - easy control with 6 keys?

[haxor999]

Hi all,

I am a first-time XBMC user, just installed it on my Apple TV running Hardy (from the SVN daily build PPA for Hardy). Needless to say, it rocks with the xTV skin :grin:

However, I'm having trouble controlling XBMC easily using my Apple remote (which only has 6 buttons - mapped to XBMC's select, left, right, up, down, menu). E.g. when I'm playing music and would like to get back to the main menu, there is no easy way to do this. I need to manually 'skip ->|' until I go past the last song in the current album/folder and (because repeat is disabled) the menu comes up again.

For movies I've discovered that 'skip ->|' stops playback of the movie and goes back to the menu (i.e. it does not start playing the next movie) - this works great for me.

Is there any way to workaround this? Can I reconfigure 'skip ->|' for music files to mean 'stop playing and return to menu' just like it seems to be doing for movies? Or could I add an extra item in the 'while playing' menu to take me back to the music selection screen? Or is there any way I can work with lirc to get more than 6 different signals out of this remote? (eg pressing 'menu' longer than 1 second results in a 7th signal - in MacOS the apple remotes seem to behave this way)

Thanks in advance!

[rodalpho]

Well, the OSXBMC guys noticed that the apple remote would recognize a button being held down differently than one sent discretely. So they added support for that to their fork. I don't believe they're using the linux eventclient to do this, they hacked their own solution together. You may have more luck running the OSX port on your appletv.

[topfs2]

Yup OSX have a talior suited eventclient for the AppleRemote. On linux we are at the mercy what LIRC can do. LIRC only sends if the key is up or down which can be made to create a sticky function but it's hard to know if it's supposed to be down or not. Say holding the volume up might not be a good thing to be mapping that key to another event.

It does sound like a good feature for an eventclient though, were it can be toggled on or off easy

Just wanted to say that you have 6 buttons in every view, incase your not famaliar with the keymap.xml (http://xbmc.org/wiki/?title=Keymap.xml) which is in your BUILD/userdata folder or .xbmc/userdata if your running PPA.

[haxor999]

Thanks for the replies! I did not look at Keymap.xml yet, but it seems that by editing it I can remap the unused remote buttons in some screens to useful functions? E.g. 'left' and 'right' don't seem to do anything while music is playing, so instead one of them can take me back to the main menu :grin: That would solve my problem.

One more newbie question (not sure it's worth it's own thread): how do I get library mode for music going? I have not changed any keymap settings yet - pressing 'i' (or 'c', forget which) on my keyboard let me set up my video library, but this does not work in my music folder... I can't get the context menu to come up.

[topfs2]

When in music rightclick on the source to choose scan to library.
In keymap it's like this: <title>ContextMenu</title>

[topfs2]

Hi all,

I am a first-time XBMC user, just installed it on my Apple TV running Hardy (from the SVN daily build PPA for Hardy). Needless to say, it rocks with the xTV skin :grin:

However, I'm having trouble controlling XBMC easily using my Apple remote (which only has 6 buttons - mapped to XBMC's select, left, right, up, down, menu). E.g. when I'm playing music and would like to get back to the main menu, there is no easy way to do this. I need to manually 'skip ->|' until I go past the last song in the current album/folder and (because repeat is disabled) the menu comes up again.

For movies I've discovered that 'skip ->|' stops playback of the movie and goes back to the menu (i.e. it does not start playing the next movie) - this works great for me.

Is there any way to workaround this? Can I reconfigure 'skip ->|' for music files to mean 'stop playing and return to menu' just like it seems to be doing for movies? Or could I add an extra item in the 'while playing' menu to take me back to the music selection screen? Or is there any way I can work with lirc to get more than 6 different signals out of this remote? (eg pressing 'menu' longer than 1 second results in a 7th signal - in MacOS the apple remotes seem to behave this way)

Thanks in advance!

BTW Do you think you could provide me with the lircd.conf and hardware.conf? It would help me alot.

Cheers,
topfs2