Phillips MCE Remote

[Beelzebub]

Just a few questions

1. Does anyone know how to remap the Windows Button. It would be nice to use that as the Home option.

2. This remote comes with a eHome Infrared Receiver. Do you know if is possible to use other remotes with it. It seems to take commands from any IR remote, or at least the light on the box lights up.


It would be nice if SageTV had built in support for this remote, using Girder is messy.

[ToxMox]

Read this thread on the girder forums regarding remapping of the windows key which seems to be the only way to get the green button to work with girder etc. When I was using the MCE remote I could only get the girder plugin to see commands from that remote only. Unless someone were to write a new plugin for the receiver to allow for other codes to register you're pretty much stuck with just the remote.
http://www.girder.nl/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=4820&highlight=mce+keyboardex

Hope this helps

[gplasky]

Here-use this:

Hotkey (http://www.hot-keyboard.com/)

The MCE Remote treats the Green Button the same as the left Windows key on the keyboard. Use this utility and map the left Windows key to the Girder command to bring up the home screen. (event.exe SageHome 18 -silent) or whatever you have the event defined as. Search in the forum-there was a post how to map to a girder event.

Doing it this way you will NOT be able to use the left Windows key to bring up the START menu but the right Windows key does the same thing. This has worked very well for me. Hope this helps.


Gerry

EDIT: Or just use it to bring up the Sage executable. This should start Sage or awake it if it is asleep and should bring you to the home screen. This way you could use it without Girder but it might be limited.

[Beelzebub]

thanks, I got it working good now.

[Morgan111]

I bought the MCE remote from newegg and it looks really great! But When I connect the IR receiver it can't find the drivers to install it under XP Home. I didn't get a disk or info with the remote and can't find any info for the driver on the web. None of the buttons have any effect. Installed girder and the MCE plugin and that shows no response either. Has anyone else run into this when installing it?

[andrewswright]

Apparently the drivers are only included with Windows MCE and XP service pack 1. I haven't heard of anyone who has gotten it to work with XP Home.

You may want to check out the remote control forum of www.myhtpc.net, I know a number of people there use the MCE remote.

If you like the remote, but can't get the receiver to work, you can always get another IR receiver (i.e. the USB-UIRT).

Andrew

[Morgan111]

Thanks Andrew. I found a large thread on the topic at myht.net under
http://myhtpc.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=524&postdays=0&postorder=asc&start=30

Looks like my best bet is the USB-UIRT which had a discussion on that remote at
http://166.70.183.44/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=93

I'm going to use it with girder to go between myHtpc and SageTV. Maybe when Sage2 comes out I can just stick with that one. Actually I will need to check out myHtpc2 also.

[-LD]

you can install under XP Home, it's just a little tricky to do so...basically you have to take some files from XP Pro and use them for the install...here's my description from the thread linked above

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
i installed the MCE remote into XP Home tonight in about 5 minutes

it's a little driver loading hack i've used on a lot of devices at work...theoretically, according to MS, a driver written for Win2k should work on any XP or any 2003 OS...and XP Home and XP Pro are realistically the same except for a few features M$ doesn't want home users to have without forking over a few extra dollars

so to get the hack to work you need a few things...first, you need the irbus.inf and irbus.pnf files from an XP Pro machine...when the IR receiver is autodetected point it to irbus.inf

XP Home will then ask for the irbus.sys file from the SP1 CD...luckily i had installed SP1 on my XP Pro machine...i believe it should store the service pack files in the C:\Windows\ServicePackFiles\i386 directory...i pointed it to there (i actually copied irbus.inf and the ServicePackFiles folder to a network share)

after that it was smooth sailing and everything installed as normal...4 things actually get installed, all related to the remote and receiver

you will get a digital signature message from XP Home because the driver is only signed for Pro, but just ignore it

so, yeah, there ya go...good luck!

[sn0wcrash]

Just wanted to add something in here. I am using this (http://webpages.charter.net/krumsick/) appliation to remap the left windows button. This program is free and works great. I use it to remap the left windows key to get the green button working on my MCE Remote. Hope it helps someone out.