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More => Old Versions => JRiver Media Center 25 for Windows => Topic started by: tzr916 on January 26, 2019, 08:58:11 am

Title: Improved IR Remote support
Post by: tzr916 on January 26, 2019, 08:58:11 am
Right now MC only sees/recognizes a fixed number of "standard WMC" IR signals. It would be so helpful if you could enable MC to see/recognize ALL infrared signals coming into the PC. Those extra signals could be used for LEARNING any of MC's MCC core commands, making the IR remote 100x more powerful and thus MC way easier to use on a big screen.
Title: Re: Improved IR Remote support
Post by: Hendrik on January 26, 2019, 09:38:11 am
Right now MC only sees/recognizes a fixed number of "standard WMC" IR signals. It would be so helpful if you could enable MC to see/recognize ALL infrared signals coming into the PC. Those extra signals could be used for LEARNING any of MC's MCC core commands, making the IR remote 100x more powerful and thus MC way easier to use on a big screen.

This should already be possible.
Go to Options -> Remote Control, Click on Devices & Options, and in the Device dropdown enable "Remote, keyboard, gamepad or other HID", this should allow MC to learn all sorts of input commands an IR receiver sends.
Title: Re: Improved IR Remote support
Post by: tzr916 on January 26, 2019, 10:06:56 am
This should already be possible.
Go to Options -> Remote Control, Click on Devices & Options, and in the Device dropdown enable "Remote, keyboard, gamepad or other HID", this should allow MC to learn all sorts of input commands an IR receiver sends.

I'll try again but this topic has been discussed and verified not working by RoderickGI.
When pressing other buttons on the remote, I can verify the PC is seeing those commands by using a utility called SHOWKEY, yet MC does NOT see them when I go to the LEARNING setup in MC.
Title: Re: Improved IR Remote support
Post by: Hendrik on January 26, 2019, 10:30:05 am
If an application like ShowKey can show it, then to the PC its not an IR command, but the driver for your IR receiver translates it into an ordinary key stroke.
There is a lot of IR receivers that do such things, IR commands are mapped to fixed keystrokes, and from an applications perspective you cannot really tell its an IR command anylonger, which is why the Learning function doesn't work.

Perhaps we can use the Learning function to also allow accepting ordinary keyboard input, but not sure what fallout that might cause.

A bunch of other IR receivers don't work with the Microsoft HID (Human Interface Device) API at all, and you have to specifically support them to get all keys, those are also very annoying.

Assuming it is a HID device, it might also help to double check which device ID it uses, in case thats one we don't handle. You can see that by looking for its entry in the Windows Device Manager, finding its entry under "Human Interface Devices", and copying the data under Details -> Hardware Ids. Unfortunately many devices don't name themself properly, so it can be a bit hard to actually find it. :(
Title: Re: Improved IR Remote support
Post by: RoderickGI on January 26, 2019, 05:32:17 pm
Thanks for the information on Showkey Hendrik.

Do you know of any Windows software we can use to confirm that an IR command is being received, and would be seen by MC in the learning function? It has been on my ToDo list for some time to try to work out what is going on with non-MCE IR commands on MC, but I haven't gotten to it yet. The only way I know to move forward is to shut down MC and run another App that would see the commands, and perhaps deduce something from that.

I'll have to look up my IR Receiver's Device ID later, but it is an Inteset receiver designed for use with MCE remotes and WMC. It should be receiving all commands I send to it from my Harmony remote, including Extended MCE commands, many of which are key combinations, but I don't know what it does with them. i.e. Whether it converts them to a keystroke.

BTW, if an IR Receiver converts received commands to a keystroke, that would be just fine. I could then set up the appropriate keyboard shortcut in resource.xml and link them to the commands I want to use. The problem until now has been that the IR Command just disappears.

Of course many apps exposed the underlying IR Code being received, and it is mostly good that MC hides that from users. But it makes fixing IR, and confirming what is happening, almost impossible.