In case you haven’t noticed, I’m on an XBMC bender. I recently setup an older system as a file server, put a crap load of storage in it, and threw some movie ISOs on there. Then I installed XBMC on my main rig. The rest is history. I was fine with the wireless keyboard and mouse, but The Fiance says we must use a remote control.

My lucky day happened last week: woot had a woot-off AND they had some MCE remotes on sale. I bought two. They’re some crappy Pinnacle ones, but at newegg they run almost $40 and I got both with shipping for less than $35.

Trying to get it to work was another issue. Out of the box Vista will recognize this remote, but XBMC wouldn’t hear anything. Works great on Windows Media Center though. So I ended up trying a program called LMRemoteKeyMap. Pretty nifty, but I didn’t feel like learning all about xml, codes, remotes, and commands. I felt like being lazy.

So then I ended up with another program called IRServer Suite. Now this one worked out of the box. Every function works as advertised. The only change I made was to get the giant green button to act as the Windows key (so I can press start). Others have made it automatically open up XBMC, but for now I just wanted start to work.

Basically you’ll just open the Translator program and follow along to have it automatically do your work for you. See how lazy I’m being?

I might include some screen shots eventually.