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greenep48

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Everything posted by greenep48

  1. After much learning and help from Chris!, I am happy to report that my Charter Cable system remote, made by Universal Electronics (see attachment), works like a champ to control XBMC using FLIRC. This remote is a little unique from the Harmony in that there is a master System Power button that cycles through all the devices for turn-on or turn-off - very handy. The issues to be resolved to get this bad boy to work may be common to lots of other cable and satellite remotes, so hopefully this helps others: 1) My Win7 HTPC has a DVD player installed, so I assigned XBMC to the DVD mode. Different device or mode selections on these remotes can behave differently, so be sure to read your remote manual carefully! 2) By default, this remote control's channel control capabilities are locked to the cable converter mode CBL. The affected keys are 1 through 0, CH+, CH-, and LAST. Deactivate this feature to allow programming these keys to other modes or devices for XBMC. 3) By default, this remote control's volume control capabilities are locket to the television mode TV. The affected keys are VOL+, VOL-, and MUTE. Deactivate this feature to allow programming these keys to other modes or devices for XBMC. 4) The operation of the Power/System Power buttons is dependent on the hardware features of your HTPC. a] Power-down: Every HTPC will have the capability to shutdown the computer from XBMC by programming the remote's mode select button (DVD in my case) to the keyboard END button. Power-down is then activated by selecting the mode on the remote then activiating the POWER button as an XBMC computer shutdown command. b] Power-on: Most HTPC systems do not have the hardware capability to do a true power-on from the remote. At best, you can set the HTPC to go into SLEEP mode on shutdown so that the USB ports remain functional and the HTPC can awaken on a subsequent power key command from the remote. SLEEP mode can sometimes be flaky - I have seen lots of spontaneous restarts from SLEEP mode. In my case, I have a cabinet fan powered from a USB port, so the SLEEP mode doesn't turn it off. I have to do a complete shutdown and use the front panel button to turn on the HTPC. Other solutions exist - search the FLIRC forums for some interesting fixes. Power-on and automatically run XBMC usually requires putting an XBMC shortcut in the HTPC Startup directory (see MS Win7 Help for directions). You should add some delay to the XBMC shortcut to be sure the HTPC is completly booted and stable before XBMC is started - not doing so can result in odd behavior from the remote and XBMC. Search the XBMC forums for more information. In my case, I needed to add 25 seconds to be sure the wireless network was connected and stable. The resulting shortcut command was everything within the brackets including all punctuation ["C:\Program files\XBMC\XBMC.exe" -d 25]. 5) FLIRC keystroke entry: For some unknown reason, my HTPC system required that the remote send a repeat of each key code for XBMC to recognize the command. The ability to do this in FLIRC is not well documented but works well when implemented (thanks to Chris! here). It turns out that you can repeat the key programming at least twice in sucession for each remote button (and sometimes more, it seems), and FLIRC will dutifully send the sequence when you activate the button. Two programming cycles for each button did the trick on my system. Hope this helps!
  2. Yeah - that link kinda went over my head. Hopefully PrintScrn it will show up on the keyboard in a future GUI update so we can stop having so much fun with this.
  3. I know this has been discussed in the forums before (see XBMC setup), but I though maybe I could add some new information to everyone's understanding of why this is so difficult. The ASCII beyboard has been around a very long time, and each technology "revolution" has modified special keys and how they operate. For example, the keyboard on an original Teletype machine has a "BREAK" key that literally broke the circuit connection as a special control command. The advent of the video display was another one of these revolutions. One problem with implementing a screen capture key is that you don't want the operting system to recognize it as a normal keypress - it is really a direct command to the video processor to capture the display memory. Therefore, the Print Screen key has no character code as it doesn't produce any character. It has a virtual key code, VK_SNAPSHOT or $2C. As it produces no character no Keypressed event is triggered. If you don't believe this, go see what Showkey reports when you hit PrintScrn - nothin'. That said, it is a very important key when using XBMC since the support staff almost won't respond to a problem unless you provide a screenshot (and rightly so in most cases!). No reply is necessary, guys. Just ramblings from an old nerd who grew up with this stuff.
  4. Thanks, and thanks to Jason and everyone else supporting FLIRC - it's a great device that certainly fills a need in the HTPC community!
  5. Some of the key sequences reported by Showkey are pretty wierd. Have you published the mapping of the GUI Console buttons (XBMC, Windows Media, etc) to keyboard equivalents?
  6. Problem solved thanks to Showkey! The table below shows the differences between the FLIRC WINDOWS MEDIA console programming (as reported by Showkey) and the MS Windows Media Center keyboard shortcuts. After correcting by direct keyboard programming of the player buttons, the remote works fine in both WMC and XBMC. Maybe the GUI (v0.96) is corrupted ??? BUTTON FLIRC-WM MS-WMC-SHORTCUTS PLAY CTRL-SHIFT-8 CTRL-SHIFT-P STOP CTRL-SHIFT-ALT-8 CTRL-SHIFT-S PAUSE CTRL-8 CTRL-P REPLAY CTRL-OEM-COMMA CTRL-F
  7. Next chaper - started over and programmed the remote to Windows Media. General controls work in WMC but the player buttons don't work. Executing the published keyboard shortcuts for the player functions works as expected, however. I'll run ShowKey tonight and see what it is putting out for the player buttons before I change to the WMC keyboard shortcuts.
  8. I may have found the answer - Windows Media Center uses different keyboard shortcuts for player controls than XBMC: http://windows.microsoft.com/en-ID/windows-vista/Windows-Media-Center-keyboard-shortcuts http://wiki.xbmc.org/index.php?title=Keyboard XBMC is supposed to be able to handle Media Center keyboard shortcuts, but not vice-versa. http://wiki.xbmc.org/index.php?title=Using_an_MCE_remote_control_in_Windows So maybe if I reprogram the FLIRC to MCE remote controls, it will work for both? I will try this tonight and see what happens. And just to make things interesting, Windows Media Player uses yet a different set of shortcuts: http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows-vista/Windows-Media-Player-keyboard-shortcuts
  9. Good suggestion - remote works like keyboard in Explorer. I can move up/down file lists, enter to select, etc. We're getting closer.....
  10. I programmed mostly from XBMC Controller plus a few full keyboard keys: assigned MENU button to Mm, PAGE+ button to page-up, etc. None of the remote buttons seem to work in Windows.
  11. Thanks - that fixed XBMC! However, now it doesn't do anything in Windows Media Play or Windows Media Center. Should I expect it to work in WMC?
  12. Hi - fresh new user here. Programmed new Flirc with my Universal Electronics remote (Charter cable system) for DVD device and plugged into HTPC running Windows 7 and XBMC. XMBC is set for "remote generates keyboard commands". All the functions work except it takes 2 keypresses for anything to happen. I think this is a Windows issue as I have seen it mentioned on other sites but I can't find how to fix it. Any ideas?
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