Mapping TV remote's eARC / CEC menu button?

Help and Support
1

I have replaced my TV with a Toshiba FireTV. Unfortunately, there are very few buttons on the remote. (https://www.amazon.com/Replacement-Remote-Insignia-Toshiba-Pioneer/dp/B0CJM49QLR/)

eARC / CEC is functioning, so I can use the TV remote. It’s almost good enough to get the job done…

Unfortunately, the TV remote’s menu button ☰ currently takes OSMC back to the OSMC home screen, like some sort of home button for OSMC. I would like to remap that button to function like my Vero 4K remote’s menu button.

Any advice on how to remap a button coming in from the TV via eARC / CEC ?

Thanks!

2

You could try using the Keymap Editor add-on to remap the keys

3

The Toshiba remotes, which include the Toshiba FireTV models, don’t forward the menu button via CEC so your can’t actually make that button do what you want. It will only ever operate the menu for the TV itself as that is how the TV is programed to work. The buttons that do get forwarded from a Toshiba and their keyid’s used for keymapping are usually as follows…

Button		Keyid
------------------
up			166
down		167
left		169
right		168
select/ok	11
pause/step	230
play		234
stop		224
chapter-	221
chapter+	223
rw			226
ff			227
eject		235

If you one of these remotes to bring up the context menu via CEC then you would have to repurpose one of the buttons that do get forwarded for this function. For example you could keymap the chapter+ button globally to the context menu (as it doesn’t have a function in most of the UI) and then keymap it in the playback windows to perform its regular function. Obviously not ideal, but it does work if you can manage to remember which button you programed for the off label function.

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4

@sam_nazarko
I had no idea this tool existed. That worked perfectly! Thank you!

@darwindesign
The menu button is definitely forwarded via eARC / CED. The home button and streaming buttons are not, unfortunately.

5

Interesting good news. I had tested the button presses years ago on 3-4 different Toshiba TV’s manufactured many years apart, I thought including a FireTV model that I no longer own. I never found that particular button to get forwarded. I’d even checked for other extra buttons from other Toshiba models using a Harmony remote as it isn’t uncommon for devices to have programing for functions not included on the remote the device ships with. What I posted above was from my notes of the only buttons I found that forward via CEC for Toshiba.

There is situations where a button can’t be programmed with keymap editor (at least not without some tweaking) but is actually forwarded. A method to determine if the button is forwarded, and therefore possible to be used, would be to ssh into your OSMC device and run the following…

kodi-send -a toggledebug
tail -F /home/osmc/.kodi/temp/kodi.log | grep HandleKey

You would then press the buttons in question on the remote and if they are forwarded you should see some messages come back. To exit out of that when your done press ctrl+c to break out of tail and then run the kodi-send command again to turn off debug logging and its associated overlay.

6

@darwindesign

I double-checked and the home and streaming buttons are not passed through. But, for my purposes, getting the menu button to bring up the osmc/kodi menu was enough.

Thanks!

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