MCE Remote and Aspect/Delete/Watched

[Jesse]

Hi,

I am deviating from my usual practice of using a usbuirt with sage and trying an MCE remote and receiver. I need them to smoothly integrate ArcSoft TMT with sage.

Anyway, I cannot seem to locate any button on the remote that will toggle through the various aspect ratios. There is an "aspect" button but it appears to do nothing at all when used with sage. There are also no "delete" or "watched" buttons.

I tried binding some of the unused buttons on the remote to the sage commands I need, but it appears this is not possible when using the MCE remote and receiver. All the commands are locked and cannot be changed.

I could get by ok without delete or watched, but the aspect button would be hard to live without.

Any help is appreciated. TIA

Jesse

[SWKerr]

I have been a Girder user for a number of years but over the holiday a tried EventGhost and love it. There is already a SageTV plug-in and EventGhost will allow you to select the function you want to assign to each button.

There are probably a lot of ways to do it but I setup EventGhost similar to the way I did Girder. I actually use the MCE key to toggle between key mappings for each application I want to control. I have one setup for Sage, PowerDVD and mouse. If it is set for Sage the PC power key will launce Sage, if it is on PowerDVD then that will launch. I have the mouse setup to launch Firefox and some keys mapped to help navigate it as well.

EventGhost is free and seems to work great for everything I have tried. It gives you complete control over how you want the buttons to work. Any Sage Keyboard command can be mapped to a key. I can post the xml file as an example if you want.

[Jesse]

Hi,

Thanks for your help. I have heard lots of good stuff regarding eventghost.

I did some searching on their forums for an ArcSoft plugin, and as I suspected, there are problems getting it to work because of a known bug in the ArcSoft software. When playing back HD discs the program will not respond to many of the keyboard shortcuts. This has been a known bug for a good while now. The program does however work very well out of the box with the MCE remote and receiver. The MCE remote also works out of the box with JRiver Media center, which I use in their "Theaterview" mode for music playback.

Since I launch both ArcSoft and JRMC from dynamic menus in sagemc I would really like to use the MCE remote and receiver as they are. Would it be possible for me to somehow pass the three commands I am missing to sage without changing the way the rest of the remote works?

If not, could I use eventghost for control only of sage, using the existing MCE remote codes to drive it? Then when I launch ArcSoft or JRMC the out of the box mce remote, receiver and codes should control these apps just fine. If I put sage to sleep in the tray when launching these other programs will it ignore the commands coming in from eventghost?

Maybe I need to live without aspect, delete, and watched...

Jesse

[SWKerr]

You should be able to go into the sage setup and assign any button on the remote to a specific command. Just find the command and hit the remote key you want to assign. Not sure if you would need to unassign something if the button was already in use. This would not require you to install something like EventGhost.

What I have found is that nothing works quite the way I want and something like EventGhost allows you to have it your way. You can use the unused buttons on the remote for whatever you want.

How do you launch Sage with the remote today? Do you just have it run at boot?

[Jesse]

Hi,

You should be able to go into the sage setup and assign any button on the remote to a specific command. Just find the command and hit the remote key you want to assign. Not sure if you would need to unassign something if the button was already in use.

I hoped this would be the case, but it seems that the ir commands are hard coded when using the mce remote. Sage will not allow me to unlink any existing commands or link any new ones.

I did decide to give eventghost a try. The documentation is pretty slim, but it was similar enough in concept to girder that I was able to begin getting it sorted out. I did some searching here on the sage forums and found some pretty helpful info to go along with the bit I was able to work out on my own.

Unfortunately I have run into a snag with EG. I had things working pretty well once I discovered that I would have to enable the folder with the sage macros every time the program was started. Then it just entirely stopped working after a restart of the machine. I tried switching sage from no remote setup to the mce remote and this did not work either. I uninstalled and then reinstalled the mce receiver and it then worked fine with sage. Once I started EG back up I got a message:

The plugin has changed the state of the HID service for this remote. To let the changes take effect, you need to manually restart the system.

Rather then restarting the system I reconfigured sage for no remote and tried EG again. It worked great. I then rebooted the machine and sure enough the mce receiver would no longer work.

Since the message mentioned the HID service I decided to uninstall and reinstall the receiver again and check the state of the HID service in the windows services applet. It was started and set for automatic. I started EG and again got the above message. I tried EG and it worked fine. I rebooted the machine and checked the service applet and found that the HID service was still Started and set for automatic. I fired up sage and EG and it would not work. Any ideas?

Thanks again for your help.

Jesse