I went back to looking at my harmony and the keymap editor, which was initially prompted by reading another thread and wanting to map a harmony button to the show subtitle - T function.
What I’ve realised is that unfortunately there’s a bit of gap between the two that I haven’t yet figured out. When I use the keymap editor it wants me to press a key which it will assign to a function, so I could push a key on the osmc remote which of course would mean I no longer have the original function on that button. Unfortunately what the harmony does is map all those original functions, so when I tested this process 3 weeks ago if I pushed one of the harmony’s unused buttons the keymap editor reacted as though a button wasn’t pushed, which makes sense as the key doesn’t have a function assigned and therefore presumably doesn’t send any signal, but if I push one of the existing functions I can indeed map it - but I need to choose one of the original functions to sacrifice.
All the osmc commands which the harmony currently knows are the standard ones, it does have the provision for you to add new commands for a device, but typically it would learn them from you pushing the button on your existing remote, which of course doesn’t exist.
You can see on the uploaded picture the current buttons assigned as they’re the ones which aren’t highlighted.
So I may resolve by reassigning one of them, but they’re all pretty key functions.
Is there a small/cheap device you’d recommend which does work this way with the keymap editor if I can’t do that?
The two functions of switching my audio config and enabling/disabling the subtitles at the push of a button are things I’d quite like to tweak easily if possible.
I think going back to the harmony I could see that when I was looking through the non-highlighted buttons to see what they did, whilst the vol up/down and mute were set for functions on my amp, the ch page up/down was set to skip forward/back, as were the ones that look like traditional fast forward at the top. I was half expecting that if I tried to process keymap using those it would stop the top skip buttons moving, but sure enough it correctly interpreted them as different buttons and I’m now golden.
Sorry to have bothered you again, but wanted to post the answer.
An alternative answer in your particular situation would also be to just hold down the play button during video playback (ie long-press) since that would already be mapped on a Vero V.
That’s great to know, thanks @darwindesign you’ve been very helpful
For a moment I was confused again, as the harmony has activities which use devices and what I’d done earlier was using its functionality to control the osmc as a device, yet when I went back to the activity the button was back on the default function. What I realised going back into keymap is that each if I push the button within devices keymap sees one number whereas in activities it’s another, once I corrected the numbers it’s working like a peach within my Vero activity
You may be making things a bit more complicated in your head than maybe it need to be. Activities are mainly for when your trying to switch to a different (litteral) activity like playing a game or switching to a particular external device. Basically when you need to adjust inputs and the remote button layout needs to change. Programming the remote in the activity for Kodi you would normally just assign all the button on the remote to what they are (note in that picture you posted not all of the buttons are assigned in the harmony software and you can change that) so play to play and red to red, etc. Unless there is some very specific reason to setup something more complicated in the Harmony software then you probably shouldn’t. At this point Kodi’s default mappings should work in a somewhat sensable manor. If there is something you want to tweak then it is just a matter of figuring out what the window name and action id and keymap that.
For example if you wanted red to toggle subtitles when your playing video but bring up the movie library otherwise then you can do that by setting a show window globally and to subtitle in fullscreenvideo. You don’t have to be stuck with a single button only doing a specific thing all the time.
