Harmony Remote - Support for channel numbers

[nbplopes]

Hi,

First of all, thank you for Boxee.

This weekend I finished the setup if my HTPC were Boxee along with Hulu Desktop, Plex, Harmony One and Remote Buddy are at the center of all the features provided.

You can have a look at my post here for a demo of what was achieved:

http://www.youtube.com/user/theminiharmony

Because I use Boxee a lot, especially for its content, I have setup some harmony remote soft button that when pressed:

- It starts Boxee if it is not started already
- It instructs boxee to run a specific App.

For instance, pressing music on Pandora it automatically starts pandora and so on.

The Boxee Apps in a Web TV environment reminds me a lot of TV Channels in a traditional sense.

Now the Harmony One provides support for us to define a list of Channels and upload Icons to the remote. These channels are mapped to numbers that are sent by the remote to the device running Boxee.

It would be nice if we could use this to make the system even easier to use.

So two request

1) Support key-presses sequences in the Harmony Remote keymaps. For instance the ability to associate the combination "123" to some command.

2) Hopefully 1) is enough to achieve what I would like. No it may be the case that some new IR frequences need to be taken into consideration for TV channels, but I doupt it.

Cheers,

Nuno

[darcilicious]

You may want to look at this post: http://forums.boxee.tv/showthread.ph...ymap#post99169 and the one above it mentions using Intelliremote Remote Server ($24, Windows only) in combination with a Harmony remote

[nbplopes]

Thanks the tip. I knew of Intelliremote from my previous attempt of making 100% user friendly Home Theatre PC.

I opted for the solution you see in the video. If you care to check it out, you'll see that I have almost all the options covered. It took me only a morning work. This from basics of connecting the Mac mini for the first time to having Boxee moving responding to soft buttons of the remote control (the ones on the LCD) and switching apps when Harmony One activities are pressed.

This in contrast with Windows and Linux systems.

What I ask is really a feature better to be with Boxee I think. My problem is not having boxee responding to the Harmony One buttons. It a step further. Is having it respond to specific key press sequences such as a number "124", "2122" etc.

If you also read their site: "http://melloware.com/products/intelliremote/"

"Intelliremote aims to provide an experience similar to owning Apple hardware ..."

Well I have Apple hardware

All in all Intelliremote is similar to Remote Buddy that I use with the Mac.

Thanks and cheers,

Nuno

[darcilicious]

You missed the bit in the actual post I pointed to (not the one above it re: Intelliremote) regarding keymap.xml -- is that no help?

I don't have time to watch a video to learn what OS you're on etc and didn't see that info in your original post. Sorry.

[nbplopes]

Hi, thank your for your time.

I already have changed the keyboard.XML to do things such opening Pandora when I press 'P' etc.

As far as I understand the keymapping fetures of Boxee it only supports mapping of a key say 'p' or key combinations such as 'alt-p'.

Maybe i'm mistaken but it does note support sequences of keys such as "123". One followed by two followed by three.

If that is not the case can you give me an example on how to do it.

Thanks once again

Cheers,

Nuno

[darcilicious]

Maybe i'm mistaken but it does note support sequences of keys such as "123".

Ah, gotcha. That very well may be the case... I haven't had to muck with it directly myself. I guess using other single or modified-single keys won't work then for what you want to do?

[nbplopes]

Ah, gotcha. That very well may be the case... I haven't had to muck with it directly myself. I guess using other single or modified-single keys won't work then for what you want to do?

Not for the specific thing I want do do. You see the Harmony One allows one to change channels by pressing "soft keys". It is a special mode different from others where it we assign channel numbers to each of the buttons. This number can be composed of 2 to 3 digits, a string of digits followed by "enter" or simply a string of digits (it depends on the abilities of the device or software receiving it).

In this mode it allows the user to define an Icon for a Channel. If you take a
look at the video there an example there for Sky TV.

The last part is the interesting bit. Because if Boxee supported strings of key presses (in particular digits) to be defined in the harmony.xml then we interesting things.

In particular we could setup an harmony activity such as "Watch Boxee TV" and a list of channels totally iconified. Say a Pandora Icon, a TED Icon and so on. You see, each App would be a channel

Without this feature we are limited to the number of key combinations, but more important we cannot use the channel list feature hence the we cannot use icons to represent the Apps in the remote control.

Cheers,

Nuno