I've recently moved house and so have inherited a new(ish) TV. The TV I was using before had a remote with a set of unused media buttons at the bottom, which I repurposed to control OpenELEC on my Raspberry Pi. Since the new remote doesn't have any buttons to spare, I had to give the Pi one of its very own. I had a look round and eventually settled upon the Xbox 360 DVD remote, which I picked up on eBay for an entirely reasonable three pounds - I expected to get a Chinese clone at that price but was pleasantly surprised to find that it turned out to be genuine! I remember setting up the old remote being fairly involved so I'm making it into a start-to-finish tutorial this time round.

Note: This tutorial was written for openELEC 3.2.4. If you're using a different version, some things might be different (particularly the paths, if you're using raspbmc or stock XBMC instead).

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Edit 15/05/13: since the release of OpenELEC 3.0.2, Airplay has been working perfectly (and most of the other bugs have vanished too). Or maybe it's that I wired everything up with ethernet when 3.0.1 came out and wireless stopped working. And by "wired" I mean "nailed the cable to my doorframe". Either way, brilliant work from the XBMC and OpenELEC teams!

The Raspberry Pi is great. For about £25, and with the help of OpenELEC, I've got my whole media library hooked up to my TV - all in all, about 1.5TB worth of entertainment.

Yeah, the speaker placement sucks.

It consolidates all the different locations (in my case, hard drives and SMB shares) into a single library for each of TV and Movies, so I can chuck someone my phone or sit them in front of a browser and everything's right there in one place. Makes choosing what to watch much easier!

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