OSMC remote on Kodi Android TV

Help and Support
1

Hello there. So I have a Pine64 (similar to the Pi3) which I have installed Android TV on with Kodi on that.

I purchased an OSMC remote control as it looked like a decent remote available for Kodi that only has the needed buttons. Most of the controls work on Kodi/Android except the home, info and context menu buttons. I have seen a couple of posts here on how you could get it to work on Kodi/Debian but wondered if it was possible to get them working on Android TV (6.0). I noticed that the OSMC player is able to switch between Android and OSMC, so I assume you can get the remote working on Android?

If anyone could help it would be most appreciated, thanks.

2

Hello

It depends on the version of Android you have. It may need to be patched to accept those three buttons.

I think the keymap for Android also takes a different input pathway, so keyboard.xml may need modifying for this to work as expected.

Sam

3

Thanks for your reply.

I had a quick look with the Kodi keymap editor, which also doesn’t recognise the button presses.
I’m far from an expert at Android but I dug a little deeper and looked at “getevent” from an ADB shell, and the button presses are being picked up in Android, though I don’t know what (if anything) I can do with this info: http://pastebin.com/XWZcUbgx

Is this more of a Kodi or Android thing? Perhaps I need to talk to a relevant community.

4

Hi

I am no Android expert either, so I took a lazy kind of approach, and patched the kernel so that the keys were remapped to regular keyboard presses. This was possible for us as we distributed Android ourselves, but I can appreciate third party ROMs may not make this possible and some people probably don’t want to do this just for a remote.

The getevent output is useful. You will see there are some instructions on using the Linux input layer here: http://kodi.wiki/view/HOW-TO:Set_up_an_MCE_remote_control_in_Linux. I believe this requires a functioning LIRC however.

There is probably a need for a userspace daemon to remap some of the events (on OSMC we use eventlircd + lirc). But I am unsure how much freedom of your system you have.

Sam

5

Thanks again for your help Sam.

Just to let you know I found a workaround for my case. I created a custom Android key layout file for the remote that binds the ‘info’ key to ‘i’ and the ‘menu’ key to ‘c’, which are default Kodi key bindings. (only tried on a build of Android TV for the Pine64)

Just in case anyone is interested in this, I have uploaded the key layout file and a bit more info here: https://github.com/MonsterKiller/OSMC-AndroidTV-Keylayout

6

Nice work.

I might make this in to an APK to make things easier for future users

Sam