That’s all there is to it! Speaking from the experience of early-media-center adopters who have been fiddling with remote control configurations for over a decade, we promise you that the Flirc experience is the easiest way to get a remote up and running on any media center that supports USB keyboards (hands down in comparison with any other method). If you have it hidden behind the TV stand or the like, and the USB port is not in a direct line of sight, then you’ll need to pick up a simple USB extender to properly position it. If your media center computer is sitting with a USB port pointing at your couch this is as easy as just plugging in the dongle. Simply install the dongle on your device in such a fashion that the two little IR receivers are visible to you wherever you’re seated and using the remote. Actually using the Flirc dongle once you’ve done the hard work of programming it is frictionless. We’ve learned about keymaps, we’ve carefully mapped out which remote buttons should correspond to which keyboard keys, and at this point all the hard stuff is behind us. Here is a list of keyboard shortcuts for common media center software/hardware arrangements: Idealy this process should be as simple as turning to Google and looking up something like “ keymap” or “ keyboard shortcuts”. To that end, the first step in getting Flirc up and running is to determine what keyboard commands do what actions on your media center. Determining Your KeymapĪlthough the Flirc configuration software does thoughtfully include button keymaps for Kodi/XBMC, Boxee, Windows Media Center, Amazon Fire TV, and even mapping for standard keyboard media keys (and we appreciate that thoughtfulness) it’s good to know how to look up and study a keymap without the assistance of the software so that you can effectively map anything to the Flirc (and not just the pre-mapped entries they provide). Let’s look at how to figure out what your device’s keymap is and then how to use Flirc to link the existing keymap with your remote. In order to configure Flirc properly you’ll need three things: the Flirc dongle/software, the remote you want to use with your media center, and a list of the keyboard inputs and shortcuts the media center software in question uses. Further, it requires you’ve already purchased an IR dongle of some sort (which can run you anywhere from $10-20). It’s not a light task, however, and certainly not a task for beginners. You see there is a fundamental problem when it comes to linking your typical universal or TV remote to a media center system like a Raspberry Pi running Kodi/XBMC, an Amazon Fire TV, a computer running Plex or Windows Media Center, or the like: these devices are either optimized for their own special remote (such as the bluetooth remote that comes with the Amazon Fire TV) or they are optimized for keymaps that map onto a keyboard (like Kodi/XBMC and Windows Media Center).ĭon’t get us wrong, it’s more than possible to dig into the guts of many media center software packages (like Kodi/XBMC) and remap the keys. The Flirc unit is far more clever than a simple storage unit though and works as an absolutely ingenious solution to the problem of linking IR-based remotes to media center software. At first glance it would be remarkably easy to confuse the Flirc unit with an actual thumb drive as the clear case, visible circuit board, and the IR receiver points (that look much like LED indicator lights) all strongly echo the design of thumb drive storage. Flirc ($20) is a tiny USB dongle about half the size of a traditional thumb drive.
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