The other way to do this is to ditch MC's "native" remote support and do it all with keyboard emulation. How? With a FLIRC.
FLIRC is a tiny USB IR receiver which can accept remote control codes from nearly any remote. Sony, Yamaha, Denon, VIsio... whatever. FLIRC can see the codes. Now the genius part: FLIRC appears to your computer as a keyboard! You use the FLIRC programming app to tell FLIRC what keys to send, when it sees specific IR codes.
So you can use the Play command on some remote and tell it to send Control-P (which is MC's keyboard command for Play). You could tell FLIRC to send these frame by frame commands when you press some other keys on some remote.
I generally use a learning remote and program it to be some device that I don't own. For example, I might program it to be a Yamaha DVD player (which I've never owned and don't plan to). Then I teach FLIRC all the keys I want to use for MC and tell it which keyboard shortcuts to use. I do all of this with the "Yamaha remote" that I just programmed into my universal.
It works quite well and allows you to do anything with a remote that you can do with a keyboard. Including functions that aren't normally available via the keyboard. This last piece is done by using MC's keyboard customization facility:
https://wiki.jriver.com/index.php/User_Defined_Global_Keyboard_ShortcutsI think I wrote a post a very long time ago that explained the keyboard mapping facility a little bit.
I've even worked out how to launch MC from the remote by using an app that launches any program you tell it to with... you guessed it: A keyboard sequence. I use something really unlikely like control-alt-J . I have a program that does this on the Mac. There's almost certainly something like that for Windows also.
Anyway, that's how I do it.
Brian.