[Ned Scott]

Alternative keymaps for Fire TV remote (wiki)

After having used Fire TV remotes for the last week, lots of thinking, and sitting in a waterfall for 10 days while meditating:

I've added keymap 4, which is what I've been using/tweaking on both my Fire TV and Fire TV Stick. The big difference is menu will do smallstepback and also opens up the channel switcher for PVR/Live TV, and there's no volume-amp on up/down. It also has quick keys for toggling shift and symbols for the on-screen-keyboard and some other stuff I added to all keymaps.

A warning about volume amplification was added to keymap 1.

Keymap 2 was merged with all the other keymaps. You can now bring up CodecInfo by first bringing up the OSD (center/select) and then pressing menu.


1, 3, and 4 have a few things shared between them when they didn't conflict:

The virtual keyboard toggles. Menu on homescreen (which normally did nothing) opens favorites. Play/pause now highlights files (for multi-file selection) in the file manager (not to be confused with file view for videos or music).



All of these should work on other HTPCs that are using the bluetooth Fire TV remote, as well. Although OS X is giving me issues with the media keys.

EDIT: also, it seems to work on ATV2, but not normal iOS iDevices.

[MediaPi]

Nice but your missing a Back action (delete character) on virtual keyboard, much more useful than Shift. I would map button 9 for Back (since the symbol on button nine looks like a symbol for delete a character) and map button 6 as Backspace (since the symbol on that button has what looks like 3 underscore symbols, underscore is used sometimes to represent the space between characters) but the rest I would acutally have gotten the same myself. good job and good thinking

EDIT just noticed your missing favourites key. one of the most useful functions in kodi! instant access to most used links of addons. button 8 on global is wasted on play/pause, use that as favourites, the only reason I can think of having global play-pause for button 8 if if you was in fullscreenvideo and pressed fullscreen to get kodi gui layered over the video, but there is no fullscreen button in your keymap so thats why I say its wasted to have play-pause for button 8.

[Ned Scott]

Nice but your missing a Back action (delete character) on virtual keyboard, much more useful than Shift. I would map button 9 for Back (since the symbol on button nine looks like a symbol for delete a character) and map button 6 as Backspace (since the symbol on that button has what looks like 3 underscore symbols, underscore is used sometimes to represent the space between characters) but the rest I would acutally have gotten the same myself. good job and good thinking

Most of the minimal keymaps don't bother with a back action on the virtual keyboard (such as the Apple remote). This is also how the Fire TV remote works by default, without a dedicated back action on VK. What I've always done is just navigate to "done" and hit select. I'm typically not in such a hurry to exit the VK as much as I am looking for a way to enter things more quickly. I could just emulate what the native Fire TV VK does and use rewind as backspace, but I found the curser move to be very valuable. I'll throw up both versions on the wiki.

What would be perfect is if the default "English QWERTY" keyboard layout in the VK used the unused space for common symbols. I would hardly use the symbols button in that case. This is possible if you edit internal files in Kodi, but they get overwritten when you upgrade. Hopefully in the future this will be a file you can modify in the userdata folder, or even better, just be the default :)



There's actually room for 8 more keys, but I like the slightly quicker wrap-around. Also, I found out that shift can change the numbers to symbols as well, if mapped that way, making most symbols accessible with default and default+shift.

EDIT just noticed your missing favourites key. one of the most useful functions in kodi! instant access to most used links of addons. button 8 on global is wasted on play/pause, use that as favourites, the only reason I can think of having global play-pause for button 8 if if you was in fullscreenvideo and pressed fullscreen to get kodi gui layered over the video, but there is no fullscreen button in your keymap so thats why I say its wasted to have play-pause for button 8.

Actually, there's two big reasons to keep play/pause as play/pause. One is music, which defaults to the background. The other is that play/pause while selecting a folder, TV show/season, or playlist has different behavior than just pressing select. By pressing play you actually generate an on-the-fly playlist that plays things one after the other, and starts playing back right away. You can also use this to quickly bypass the info screen on a single video if you make the default-select action to "show info" (which is kind of what netflix does in their UI for select).

I use "play" directly on TV shows all the time now since I keep "the random" setting on. With one button I can play a random episode of the selected show :)

I also don't use the Favorites menu very often. I normally map my most used add-ons and such directly to the home screen and toggle back to there for access to that kind of stuff. But maybe that's just me.

[Calum]

First and foremost, thanks for doing this.

I do have a question though, why not use the backspace as the small step back button while in fullscreen video action? My ideal setup would be highly based on keymap 4 but with the menu button mapped to the OSD, and backspace mapped to small step back. The stop I get, it's just counter intuitive to me.

One more question, is it possible to map the home button to anything else? I'd like to prevent babysitters from inadvertently going back to the FTV menu.

[Ned Scott]

Nice but your missing a Back action (delete character) on virtual keyboard

I finally tried this the other day. For some reason I can't prevent the Back button from being anything other than backspace when the virtual keyboard is up. I tried to make a map that was more like the default FireTV interface, which uses back as exit, rewind as delete, fastforward as space, and play/pause as enter.

Everything works except FF as space and Back as exit.

[MediaPi]

thats strange, sounds like a bug? I'm sure you tried to see what command kodi sees the button as, I use this on my pi
tail -F /storage/.xbmc/temp/xbmc.log | grep OnKey

Ned I'm not sure what your trying to accomplish, on my key map I got back button as backspace
<back>BackSpace</back>
this action is the delete character, this is what you want to change your back key to at the moment?

[Ned Scott]

Ah, I see what it is. I was using <browser_back>, which is how the key from the remote is identified on Linux. On Android it is seen as <back>. Thanks for putting me on the right path. Now I just need to put in a feature request to make "space" an actionID :D

[MediaPi]

try
Number0
eg
<forward>Number0</forward>

(Number0 cycles through spacebar,0,...) Edit I guess this isn't the best solution since a user might consectively press FF twice and think wow they get a zero, but for the small phrases you would never really need to press space twice)

I;m pretty honoured I got a thank from Ned Scott

edit, not sure if this will help also but I use a tsop ir receiver in conjunction with lirc on my Pi and the code above

Code:

tail -F /storage/.xbmc/temp/xbmc.log | grep OnKey

tells you what action kodi saw but this command (typed in putty for example)

Code:

irw /var/run/lirc/lircd-lirc0

tells me what key I pressed (what keyname kodi saw I pressed)
not sure if that would work without having setup lirc, if it does it could help in future assignment of keys, let me know if that works (you might have to see where lircd-lirc0 is in android but its
irw followed by where that file is and ofcourse have debugging on)

[MediaPi]

Ned if you want back as exit try this
<back>PreviousMenu</back>

I'm sure that works and I think this works to
<back>Close</back>

to get back as exit

[Ned Scott]

Full correction, for Android it is seen as <backspace>. It all works and I updated all of the wiki keymaps that way, as it sounds like no one was using the ff/rw/and play buttons with the previous method. This should make it much more consistent with the native Fire TV virtual keyboards.

[touser]

Is there any way to map the home button to an action? I'm using the remote on x86 pc's and raspberry pi's so being able to use the button would be extremely useful.

[Ned Scott]

There is, but offhand I forget which key it is. I'll hunt down my bluetooth USB dongle in a bit and find out.

[loki131]

Hey Guys, I just configured a Fire TV Remote (the one without the speaker button) for my OpenElec box and realized that I didn't have any way to stop my music once it starts, possibly I'm missing something in the keymaps but since I couldn't get to fullscreen I couldn't use the Back button as the stop. My solution was to add a Fullscreen command to the Home button on the home screen, essentially when you start the music you hit the Home button twice then you can use the Back button to stop it.

<Home>
<keyboard>
<browser_home>Fullscreen</browser_home>
</keyboard>
</Home>
<Visualisation>
<keyboard>
<browser_back>Stop</browser_back>
</keyboard>
</Visualisation>

If there was already a way to deal with this that I missed please let me know!

[MediaPi]

why didn't you just set a button to map to "stop" ?
thats the action to stop anything thats playing

[touser]

There is, but offhand I forget which key it is. I'll hunt down my bluetooth USB dongle in a bit and find out.

Excellent, thank you. Do you mind linking to/explaining how you find keypress info for usb/bluetooth devices? I only have experience using lirc with irw for IR devices, bluetooth/usb devices have me confused.