Kodi Community Forum

I have a VRC-1100 remote control that I have been happily using for some time now to control my x86-based HTPC under OpenELEC. Now however I am trying to switch over to using my shiny new Odroid-C1 as my new HTPC, and unfortunately, the current official (Linux) OS release for this is based on Ubuntu, which apparently has some really major problems with groking this specific remote.

If you google around long enough, as I have, you'll see lots and lots of people talking about the compatability problems they've experienced when trying to use this specific remote with XBMC/Kodi, and you'll also find at least a few different solutions suggested. Only one of these seems to have the official blessing of Team Kodi, however, i.e. this one:

HOW-TO:Configure VRC-1100 remote for Ubuntu

So I meticulously followed every single bit of the instructions on that page... testing first on one of my regular x86-desktop systems (running Ubuntu 14.04.1 LTS) to see if these instructions would allow me to have the VRC-1100 work properly under Ubuntu, but of course, trajedy. Now the remote doesn't work at all. I'd like to say that I'm surpriised by this outcome, but given that the page above seems to have been written way back in September of 2010, most probably in relation to some much older release of Ubuntu than what's generally recommended today, is really isn't totally surprising that these instructions just don't work anymore.

So, um, two questions:

1) Who wrote that page in the wiki about the VRC-1100 and how may I contact him/her?
2) How can I debug this and get it running properly?

(Sorry. I guess that's really three questions.)


P.S. The good news is that I made it all the way down to the "run irw" step in the instructions, and sure enough, all of the various buttons I pressed on the remote seem to have been received and to have been been recognized correctly... at least as far as irw was concerned.

this remote works out of the box on halfway recent ubuntus without lirc. It will show up as keyboard. Some buttons (mostly the color ones) need keymapping via keyboard.xml.

So, um, just to be clear, you are saying that I should junk the 14.04.1 release and try something newer?

No, these remotes work out of the box on 14.04. It's just that the USB IR receveir presents itself to the OS as a keyboard / mouse combo, not a remote. Buttons send key presses, and the d-pad on the remote sends mouse events. The arrows send arrow-key keypresses, etc. No need for lirc, irw, etc... Basically it must not be considered as an IR remote. Enable the keyboard / mouse in Kodi settings if it's disabled and it should just work.

Now if you want say to use a universal remote to talk to the IR receiver, then it's another matter: the comm protocol between the remote and IR receiver is not widely known and it's not a standard IR remote encoding. Logitech Harmony has support for those remotes though so if you have an Harmony universal remote it can be used with the IR receiver.

neutro,

I really hope that you can help me with this. This is a currently/still a show-stopper for me as far as using my new Odroid-C1. Let me describe exactly what I did, and what the results were.

First, I started out with my Odroid-C1, and loaded that up with the latest official Linux OS release (their version 1.2) from Hardkernel, i.e. the manufacturer of the C1. I plugged in the VRC-1100's IR receiver to the C1 and tried various buttons. I immediately found that while most of the buttons on the remote did work, and did do exactly what they were supposed to do, the STOP and NEXT (song, video, chapter) buttons didn't do anything at all. (I believe that Hardkernel's OS is based on Ubuntu 14.04.1 LTS, but I need to double check that.) I didn't check 100% of the buttons, so there may be others that didn't work also.

Of course, I wanted to see if this was a problem limited to the Odroid OS release, so I loaded up official Ubuntu 14.04.1 LTS only a partition on a removable external (USB 3.0) drive on one of my x86 desktop machines. I then installed Kodi on that, following exactly the instructions I found here:

http://kodi.wiki/view/HOW-TO:Install_Kodi_for_Linux

I then booted that up and plugged in the VRC-1100's IR dongle to that (x86 desktop) machine and tried out the various buttons.

I found that everything was exactly as on the Odroid-C1 in this case... Most of the VRC-1100's buttons worked and did the Right Thing, whereas the STOP and NEXT buttons did absolutely nothing.

Now you are telling me that this specific remote works just fine with Kodi/XBMC under 14.04.1, but with some certain (special, non-default?) setting(s) in Kodi. OK. If that's true then that's terrific. However can you please tell me exactly what Kodi settings I should be diddling to get this to work properly? (I'm currently searching for an emoticon that indicates desperation. :-)

Separately, and not related to the above, as it happens, I do own two Logitech Harmonys... a 300 and a 600. I suppose that if worse comes to worse, that I could use one of those to control the C1, however I really prefer to use the VRC-1100 because unlike the Harmonys, it has this thing that I think you are calling a d-pad, i.e. the round thing in the middle that allows you to express mouse movements. (That comes in very handy with XBMC/Kodi from time to time, and the Harmonys don't have that.)

I'm not sure that I understand exactly what you have said about the Harmonys. Did you just mean to say that they can be programmed to emulate the VRC-1100? If so, that's a Good Thing, I guess, but even if I did that it still would not solve my fundamental problem, which is the non-working buttons. (I really am desparate to solve this.)

A quick follow-up...

I checked Kodi System Settings / Input Devices. It has only the following potentially relevant options:

Enable mouse and touch screen support
Enable joystick and gamepad support

Both of those seem to be enabled by default. So with regards to these things, at least, I am good to go.

Separately, I just did a full restore on my Ubuntu partition, effectively rewinding the state of that back to before I started to to to diddle things to make the VRC-1100 work. Then, just as a test, I tried using the VRC-1100 with Kodi again and also tried it without any other keyboard or any other mouse plugging into the system in question. In both cases the problem is still there... the STOP and NEXT button are still not doing anything... other than making the little light inside the VRC-1100's IR receiver blink on briefly (indicating that communication between the remote and the IR receiver is at least working OK).

For me at least this most certainly does not work "out of the box". At least not with stock Ubuntu 14.04.1

NEVERMIND!

It appears that the problem is all down to Ubuntu's Unity desktop environment greedily grabbing some of the key presses on the VRC-1100 for itself, before they even make it to XBMC/Kodi.

The solution is prodvided by denz13, in this thread:

http://forum.kodi.tv/showthread.php?tid=208864

As soon as I get a spare moment, I will add notes to that effect near the top of the (hopelessly outdated) information on the Kodi wiki page that I mentioned earlier:

http://kodi.wiki/view/HOW-TO:Configure_V...for_Ubuntu

Hi ronbaby, sorry for not advising sooner but I'm not even at home yet

I'm not sure I have the exact model of remote (I think there are several clones of that remote) but they probably all share the same IR receiver which is in fact the core of this setup. I had problems before because trying to associate keyboard shortcuts (such as CTRL-E, which is sent by one of the color buttons for example) in Gnome didn't work in a persistent fashion (shortcuts were ignored after a while). This was actually a Compiz issue. In Ubuntu 14.04 it appears that keyboard shortcuts defined in Gnome work undifinitely for me. Anyway this actually has nothing to do with the remote and IR receiver, nor Kodi/XBMC.

I didn't notice any problem with Kodi but I just upgraded; I'll check, perhaps I need the denz13's fix too. I seldom use the next button and most often use "pause" instead of "stop" so perhaps I just didn't notice the issue in fact.

The most pressing issues I have with Kodi and Ubuntu right now are that 1) I dont see the mouse pointer at all inside Kodi (though the mouse works -- I see the buttons lighting up when mouse is over) and 2) whenever I play a video the seek bar is always visible on top right. I have no idea if those issues are caused by me hitting keyboard shortcuts by accident or if there are settings to change for this. Randomly hitting keys on the keyboard did not solve the problems so far

Credit where credit is due: Actually, it was Memphiz who first suggested the solution, but the later follow-up by denz13 actually fleshed out exactly what needed to be done and with enough clarity and specificity so that even an Ubuntu newbie like me could actually implement the fix.

Sorry, I can't help on your other problems. I can only suggest my standard hardware debugging approach: Unplug as many things as possible until the problem goes away. :-)

P.S. Is there a way to add a [SOLVED] tag to the subject line of a thread such as this one? If so, how would I do that?

(2015-01-29, 00:07)ronbaby Wrote: [ -> ]Sorry, I can't help on your other problems.

Well one thing that already helps is that it seems you don't have those problems running Kodi on Ubuntu 14.04? I'm on 14.10 but there shouldn't be much difference.

Quote:P.S. Is there a way to add a [SOLVED] tag to the subject line of a thread such as this one? If so, how would I do that?

No idea, sorry!

Ha! Just for the record, I found the source of my problems with the mouse cursor not showing and the seek bar always showing. Somehow forgot that I had a PS3 controller plugged into my HTPC. When this happens and joystick control is enabled, the mouse pointer is not shown. "It's not a bug, it's a feature" Not sure about the seek bar, but disabling joystick support brought back the mouse pointer and made the seek bar disappear. I guess I could also have unplugged the controller

Found the answer here. Thanks @wsnipex.

Also, I definitely have the same problem with the stop button on my remote. Never noticed before

If you have some easly attachable media that has two or more things on it (e.g. two videos or two audio files), try also the >>| button which is just to the right and slightly down from the big PLAY button. But first, go into to System Settiings and under Video check "Play next file automatically". Then play the first file and as it is playing, click on that >>| key. If everything is working properly... as it is under OpenELEC/x86... then the next video should immediately start up.

But as your STOP button isn't working, your >>| probably won't be working either.

I thought that I should follow-up here, and close out this thread with info about the solution I found... for the benefit of posterity, in case some other schmo experiences this same problem in the future and googles around and (thus) comes upon this thread.

Ultimately, I found the solution in another thread, and then took it upon myself to update the following page with the information for how to fix this problem on current versions of Ubuntu:

http://kodi.wiki/view/HOW-TO:Configure_V...for_Ubuntu

(My additions are pretty much just the stuff in the paragraph that starts with IMPORTANT NOTICE:)

Since this is one of two threads now referenced by a number of other threads about the VRC-1100, I'll add something I previously wrote about this remote:

Green Start Key and IE Key
After you fix Unity 'grabbing' the media keys (in settings / keyboard / shortcuts) -- the VRC-1100's (1) green "Start" key and the (2) IE key will still be non-functional. You can improve the green key.

I set the green start key to go to the "top menu" by adding this line to /home/htpcuser/.kodi/userdata/keymaps/keyboard.xml in the <keymap> <global> <keyboard> section:


However, I was unable to fix the IE key, I asked about it here: http://forum.kodi.tv/showthread.php?tid=208896 but there weren't many suggestions.

Volume and Channel
Another thing that might improve your VRC-1100 is switching the "volume +/-" and "channel +/-" functionality. The VRC-1100 doesn't normally have a "fast repeat" of the volume button, but it does have a fast repeat of the channel button. So, by flipping the buttons functionality, you will get fast repeat on volume rather than channel (which I think is way more useful).

You need to edit the <pageup> and <pagedown> lines in /home/htpcuser/.kodi/userdata/keymaps/keyboard.xml . This will flip the buttons and make the physical "channel button" quick repeat volume up and down. And the physical "volume button" will change channels without a repeat. You probably already have these lines present, you will need to edit each occurrence in the keyboard.xml file to look like this:


Edit: I added about the volume keys.