[msfc]

During Visualization, the Play/Pause and center buttons on my aluminum Apple Remote both do Play/Pause. I want the center button to bring up song info instead so I made the following change to <visualization> in a copy of customcontroller.AppleRemote.xml in my userdata folder.

Code:

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<       <button id="5">Pause</button>
---
>       <button id="5">Info</button>

id="5" is the center button. Now both buttons bring up song info. So I added a line

Code:

147a148
>       <button id="12">PlayPause</button>

where id="12" is the Play/Pause button. I also tried Pause instead of PlayPause. In all cases both buttons do the same thing, bring up info.

I turned on the debug log and pressed a few of the buttons but nothing appears in the log.

Why do these buttons have the same behavior? How can I debug the problem?

[Rechi]

Have you enabled debug logging?
With debug logging the log should show you the ids of the pressed keys.
See Debug log (wiki)

[msfc]

Have you enabled debug logging?

I turned on the debug log and pressed a few of the buttons but nothing appears in the log.

So yes. By "nothing", I mean no key press reports or key ids.

[msfc]

So yes. By "nothing", I mean no key press reports or key ids.

I just checked again. I only see messages when I press keys on the real keyboard. Nothing when I press keys on the remote.

[Memphiz]

That's because remote goes via XBMCHelper service - you might find some printouts in the generic system log maybe (just search for XBMCHelper in the console app)

[msfc]

I solved this. The problem was that I use Remote Buddy and it was sending "Select" for both the center and play/pause buttons. I first tried changing the Remote Buddy preferences to send "Play" for the latter button. That didn't work so I tried "Pause", which did. Changing both Remote Buddy and customcontroller.AppleRemote.xml was necessary.

The comment in customcontroller.AppleRemote.xml that says the button id values come from SDL is utter rot.

While investigating this I turned off Remote Buddy. When it was off I found that a long press on the center button no longer made Kodi go to full screen (at least not when pressed in the playlist window, I didn't test anywhere else). This surprised me because that action is set in customcontroller.AppleRemote.xml. I didn't investigate.

Note for anyone else messing with this stuff. If you quit or run Remote Buddy after Kodi has been run, you must kill the XBMCHelper service before restarting Kodi. It disables itself when it finds Remote Buddy running and it keeps running after Kodi exits.