Category Archives: XBMC

Setting up the Xbox 360 DVD remote with OpenELEC

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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Airplay is rubbish: better audio streaming to XBMC

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.

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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