Kodi Community Forum

Hi, I just upgraded to a fire tv stick 4k, from a 2nd gen fire tv stick, and installed the latest release candidate of Kodi 18 on it. So far, I've set up kodi, added some music, and customized things the way I like them. Primarily I use kodi for music playback from my nas, and live tv. I use to have a keymap that was on my old fire tv, that I copied to my new fire tv with kodi 18, that specifically takes the "fast forward" and "rewind" buttons on the fire remote, and re-maps them to skipnext and skipprevious. This used to work perfcet on my old fire tv stick running kodi 17.6, but just does not work with whatever I try on my new fire stick 4k running kodi 18. It seemed like this is semi-similar to this thread, but I really want to use the fast forward and rewind buttons as opposed to the OP of that thread using the up down navigation buttons on the fire tv remote to solve his issue. Again this used to work perfect on my old setup, but I am not sure what to do other than running kodi 17, on my new fire tv stick 4k. The main reason I want to change this, is so I can skip, or replay a song by default, rather than fast forwarding or rewinding the song. Just in case anyone wants it here is my debug log, and here is my original keymap

:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>

<keymap>

  <Global>

    <remote>

      <rewind>SkipPrevious</rewind>

      <fastforward>SkipNext</fastforward>

    </remote>

  </Global>

  <Home>

    <remote>

      <menu>XBMC.ActivateWindow(Favourites)</menu>

    </remote>

  </Home>

  <FullscreenVideo>

    <remote>

      <menu>seek(-7)</menu>

      <backspace>Stop</backspace>

      <browser_back>Stop</browser_back>

      <rewind>Rewind</rewind>

      <fastforward>FastForward</fastforward>

    </remote>

  </FullscreenVideo>

  <VideoMenu>

    <remote>

      <backspace>Stop</backspace>

      <browser_back>Stop</browser_back>

    </remote>

  </VideoMenu>

  <VideoOSD>

    <remote>

      <menu>ShowSubtitles</menu>

    </remote>

  </VideoOSD>

  <MyFiles>

    <remote>

      <play_pause>Highlight</play_pause>

    </remote>

  </MyFiles>

  <virtualkeyboard>

    <remote>

      <menu>shift</menu>

      <play_pause>enter</play_pause>

      <rewind>backspace</rewind>

      <fastforward>number0</fastforward>

      <browser_back>PreviousMenu</browser_back>

      <backspace>PreviousMenu</backspace>

    </remote>

  </virtualkeyboard>

  <Visualisation>

    <remote>

      <browser_back>Fullscreen</browser_back>

    </remote>

  </Visualisation>

  <Favourites>

    <remote>

      <browser_back>close</browser_back>

    </remote>

  </Favourites>

  <NumericInput>

    <remote>

      <browser_back>Close</browser_back>

    </remote>

  </NumericInput>

  <PVROSDChannels>

    <remote>

      <browser_back>Close</browser_back>

    </remote>

  </PVROSDChannels>

  <PVROSDGuide>

    <remote>

      <browser_back>Close</browser_back>

    </remote>

  </PVROSDGuide>

  <PVROSDDirector>

    <remote>

      <browser_back>Close</browser_back>

    </remote>

  </PVROSDDirector>

  <PVROSDCutter>

    <remote>

      <browser_back>Close</browser_back>

    </remote>

  </PVROSDCutter>

  <MyTVSettings>

    <remote>

      <browser_back>PreviousMenu</browser_back>

    </remote>

  </MyTVSettings>

</keymap>

Please help me fix this/figure this out, and thanks.

Yes it's exactly what is mentioned in the other thread.

Ok, well is there any fix Or can this at least be fixed before the full release of kodi 18

Don't think so because they're intercepted by the OS.

Then why and how did it work on my old fire tv running kodi 17?

Also, I thought the whole point of a keymap was so that you could remap buttons, to whatever you want, regardless of what android uses them for.

Have you tried using the keymap editor addon? I have not used it to remap the exact keys you want but it did work for what I wanted.

Won't work as it's only editing Kodi's keymaps which is overridden by the OS.

Again, this works perfectly on 17, and this really bothers me, there must be something new Kodi 18 is doing to prevent this from working. also, last night I tried upgrading my old fire stick to Kodi 18, (after backing up everything first), and as expected the skip and reply buttons do not work correctly. I checked my keymap, and it is the same. Also before I updated, I made sure it still worked under 17. It did.

So to recap, there must be something new in 18 that is preventing this from working. Honestly sounds like a bug in 18 to me.

Any news on this I'm currently trying to use a keymap editor app on the fire tv. Unfortunately it's not working as it requires accessibility services, and i can't figure out how to enable it on a fire tv. I'm using Button Mapper, by flar2. Worked perfect on an android phone, to remap buttons, but not on my fire tv.  It sure would be nice if this could just be fixed in kodi. Could someone please look into why this works perfect in 17, but fails to work on 18? Was it part of the android specific code that was removed from kodi, that I've read about in the kodi dev blogs? Could someone please help me figure this out?

I FINALLY Got a working solution to remap keys on the fire tv, via sideloading a button remapper, some complex adb commands, and more. Here is the info, just in case this helps someone out in the future.

Step 1. Sideload the app "Buttons Remapper" from the dev "irishin". can by found on the play store, or apk site, such as apkmirror.
step 2. try to turn on the accessibility service when starting the app. if in case you can turn on the accessibility service, great. just configure the app. if not, continue to step 3.
step 3. connect to the fire tv via adb debugging. run this command once you are connected.
adb shell settings put secure accessibility_enabled 1
then this.
adb shell settings put secure enabled_accessibility_services com.irishin.buttonsremapper/.remapper.ButtonsAccessibilityService
step 4. reboot the fire tv.
Step 5 after loading the app, configure the buttons, as necessary. move the cursor, over to the + button, and add a custom keymap.

This works fine for me, and works perfect as a workaround for kodi 18 on the fire tv. It really sucks though that I had to come up with this solution, rather than using kodi's keymap, as this was semi-difficult to figure out. I really wish this keymap bug could be fixed correctly in kodi 18, rather than having to rely on another app to do the remapping.

I'm having the exact same issue but in regular Android using a bluetooth'ed Fire remote.  From what I can tell this problem is not unique to FireTV, but rather due to the implementation of MediaSession in 18.  The remote worked great in 17.6, but the rewind, play/pause, and fast-forward buttons only are not keymap-able in Kodi 18.  Unfortunately, Button Mapper did not work for me properly.  I tried changing the play/pause button on the fire remote to android's "Volume Up."  Outside video playback it works as expected.  However, once I start videos it performs both "Play/Pause" and android's Volume Up.  It would be nice if the behavior could be reverted back to how it was in 17.6, especially for video playback.
For anyone else that stumbles across this thread like I did, according to this report (https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc/issues/15003), the bug has been reported by others, but as of now there is no solution apart from briantho's "Button Mapper" which may work for some people since it fixed his problem (lucky... ).

Hello I just downloaded kodi 18 on my new firestick with Alexa, it says. In order to populate with my personal media I must add a media source and configure it. I'm new to firestick and kodi so if you can help me I would be very grateful. Thank you