Apple remote on client

[brewston]

Hiya

I was thinking of replacing the aging laptop client in my kitchen with mac mini running OS X and Mac client

I need it to be totally hands off (ie no digging out the keyboard except in exceptional circumstances) How well does the Apple remote work with Sage ? Can it send the machine to standby ? (and wake it!)

I guess my other option would be installing XP under boot camp. Any experiences of running a client in this fashion ? ie does it automatically reboot to XP on powercycle etc ?

Thanks

Brewston

[jimbobuk]

you can buy a program to really extend what you can do with the simple remote, sadly i've had problems with it behaving with frontrow and leopard.

More importantly i just tried this out on my client demo and the apple remote seemed to do nothing at all to sage tv.. am i right that there is no support for this? is it down to just too few buttons on the remote?

Are any other remotes supported, you can't expect to try and get this beneath the tv without a remote support.. that's what i've found after wasting money on the apple bluetooth keyboard and mighty mouse.. no one really wants to be using them to just watch stuff.

[jimbobuk]

as is though, holding down play/pause with the remote eventually brings up an icon which u let go with it there and it sleeps.. similarly you can wake it up from sleep with it.. for that at least it seems pretty good.

[jimbobuk]

doh, i had no idea that u could just assign commands in the mac version.. I'm gonna salvage an unused MPV remote and try to map that up.. this could work well. Cheers

[jimbobuk]

hmm. Went to try out assigning buttons of another remote and sadly it didn't seem to be that easy.. no remote presses by anything other than the apple remotes were recognised.

I checked to see if remote buddy would help, but it doesn't seem to. It seems like the IR receiver on the mac is no good at arbitary remote controls, unless there is some equivelant of girder on windows to map remote presses to keyboard presses. Any ideas guys?

I did encounter another problem though, Remote Buddy is a good app for working the mac via just the apple remote, u can run programs, browse files etc. I added SageTV Client and it loaded it up fine, sadly the remote kernel extensions installed seemed to stop sageTV receiving any remote presses at all.. I've asked the author of the app but thought i'd ask here as well.. it'd be great if these two apps would play nicely together or at least just function whilst the other is installed.

One other issue is sage doesn't work as best as it could with the limited number of buttons of the apple remote.. it only seems to allow for a button press to map to one function.. sensible but stops you being able to have any playback controls when you have assigned select and home to the two buttons available. One major issue is there is no GUI elements in the main menu to exit.. is there an option to add this because at least that way you'd be able to exit sage and be ready to go into frontrow.

Otherwise the app works well on mac, congrats to Frey for adding this support... its come on a long way since when i first brought this app! Just a few more steps to allow a standard mac setup to interact a little better via the limited apple remote and i think it could be close to perfect!

[oceanfront]

I've been using Sofa Control to control SageTV with my Apple remote. I had to configure a quick script to make it work, but it was nothing more than assigning keystrokes to Apple remote commands. It works well for everything apart from when you're browsing the program guide, there's no way of getting back to the main video without either selecting the program you're currently watching in the guide, or using the mouse to click on the video window.
http://www.caseapps.com/sofacontrol.html

[gveres]

Hi Oceanfront,

You don't need anything other than sage to use your Apple remote with sage. Just go to the part of the config where you can assign key strokes to commands. When it asks you to press a key, press an apple remote button. This works fine.

I am with jimbobuk.

I want to use a universal remote to control Sage running on my Imac, just like I control any other sage client (for instance, I want more than 6 buttons!!!).

I am looking for some program that will use the built-in IR reciever of the imac to recognize arbitrary IR codes from other non-apple remotes. If somebody has such a solution, please let us know!

Greg