[mebby]

You won't need to do anything to the remote. oE will love your remote as it is.

I've got some custom key presses that take me directly to certain Playlists like "Kids DVDs"

With your harmony setup, are you using the "MCE Keyboard" device to send keyboard keys/codes to XBMC? Eg P for Play X for Stop etc... This is the same way I have mine setup and as you say works perfectly in windows but Ive always wondered whether OpenElec would also honour those keyboard IR codes, or if it only understands the MCE remote commands like Play Stop etc (not keyboard codes A-Z 1-0 tab enter etc). Hopefully it sounds like it may well support them out of the box, which makes it much more easy for me to shift to OE (eg on my celeron NUC where bitstream DTS-MA is not workign due to driver/intel issue, but in OE it's apparently fine). I didnt want to have to redo my logitech remote setup if I was only giving OE "a try"

Sounds interesting binding a keypress to go to certain playlists - what does the XBMC keymap entry for that look like? Are these "smart playlists" or something else? I tried using them but they dont seem to sync between multiple XBMC clients, eventhough Im using the mysql database for shared library. I guess they are stored per client which makes it a bit less friendly to set them up if you have multiple clients. How have you done a smart playlist for kids movies, for example (what criteria did you use)? It would be best if I could just have a key mapped to go to a file/folder location rather than a playlist, is that possible?

Well... I haggled with this nearly all day yesterday. Getting Openelec installed on my new NUC was ridiculously easy. Getting the remote to work was a bit of a struggle. I've got it working reasonably well but I've still got some things to work out.

First of all - OE doesn't appear to recognize many of the MCE keyboard commands via IR. The key presses just don't register. Oddly enough though - when using my keyboard those key presses work beautifully. I would've thought that changing the setting to have remote presses send keyboard commands would've solved it but nope. I even tried this using my MCE IR receiver that plugs in via USB. No dice. It recognizes some of the commands but not most.

I ended up changing my Harmony setup to use an MCE Extender instead of the MCE Keyboard and things started getting much easier. The only problem with this option is that there aren't nearly as many readily available custom commands. With the keyboard option you can use all sorts of special keys (like all the F keys for instance... F1, F2, etc) but with the MCE Extender you basically are limited to Red, Yellow, Green, Blue (and maybe My Videos, My Music, etc but I haven't tried this yet).

So where before I had F2 going straight to Baby DVDs and F3 going straight to DVDs it's now replaced with the color buttons for the MCE Extender.

To answer you question regarding the keymap file - it looks like this:

<red>ActivateWindow(Video,"special://profile/playlists/video/Baby.xsp")</red>

In my Windows version of XBMC I could get these to go straight to paths in addition to Playlists (as you can see - I'm using Playlists here) but I can't seem to get that to work in OE for some reason. You just replace everything after "(Video,) with the path. Just FYI - the Playlist option is nice because you can really customize things. For instance I have movies like Shrek in my Kids DVD folder and I have all of the non-kid DVDs in a folder named DVD. I've created a tag called Family and then tagged certain "Kids DVDs" with the Family tag and then I've defined my DVDs Playlist to go to the DVD Path AND pull in all movies tagged Family. Works great.

The one limitation with Playlists is that they can only store movies, episodes, or both. So for things like Home Videos where you aren't scraping information, a Playlist won't work. So the only one to use a key press to get directly to Home Videos (that I know of) is to use the ActivateWindow command but have it go directly to a folder path. BUT... I can't seem to get this to work very well with OE.

Anyone successfully use the MCE Keyboard device on a Harmony with OE?

If I can't find a way to use the MCE Keyboard device then I'll use my old Pronto to teach RCA codes to the Harmony and then assign those to the XBMC Keymap to run all my special commands (like FullScreen, and Home).

It's odd to me that OE is any different than XBMC on Windows. I wonder if it's a NUC thing or an OE thing?