Lies, Chicanery, and Deceit: Creative Labs Remote Control Drivers
I've been to hell and back again to find decent drivers for Creative Live!-type remotes. My HTPC was built on a budget and doesn't have iMon or Remote Wonder or anything nice like that; just a plain old Live! Drive from Goodwill hooked up to an old Audigy. I'm using a Logitech Harmony 520 I got at Goodwill for the remote.
I) Creative's Remote Center.
This driver was the most difficult to get, install, and use. Here's a step-by-step procedure:
1) Download the Compaq SoundBlaster Audigy/Live! driver CD. It's huge (~400MB) but you'll need it to get Creative's other remote control software to install.
2) Run the self-extracting archive and navigate to whatever folder you extracted it to. Run the Remote Center setup wizard only. Reboot.
3) Go to the Creative website. Download the latest version of Remote Center (1.40.26) and run the installer. It will complain that you don't have the right driver revision installed and quit.
4) Run an advanced search for the word 'remote' including hidden files and folders as well as system folders. One or more of them will be in your user profile's temporary directory. Navigate to that folder and run the setup wizard. Reboot.
5) Craft scripts similar to the one I found after Googling obscure forums.
Obviously this driver sucks. Moving on...
II) Intelliremote 1.0.
Intelliremote is an interesting piece of software that claims to read the MIDI events from Creative's funky remote implementation and generate Intellitype events just like decent multimedia keyboards. This would be nice since all my media players support Intellitype hooks. Intelliremote requires that Microsoft's Intellitype keyboard drivers are installed (Intellitype Pro 5.5) Unfortunately, the software is unmaintained and didn't work.
III) RM-X
RM-X contains a derivative of the Intelliremote source and comes in the form of a plugin for a single media player. You pick a media player from their list of supported players and configure your remote to control that player. RM-X supports a wider variety of remotes beyond the Creative ones and can generate keyboard events and such for those. RM-X worked but the volume control would only control Winamp's volume instead of the system volume and I really wanted something that could control the whole system. I could get that here for $15 but I didn't know if it would work or not.
IV) Girder
Girder costs money, more than the sum total I've spent on this project so far. It's also extreme overkill for what I want to do, plus last time I tried the trial the UI felt like it was put together by a high school student. Moving on...
V) Intelliremote 2.0
Just when I was despairing of finding the Windows analog of LIRC I finally find the winner. This version of Intelliremote actually works, supports profiles for different media players depending on what's highlighted as well as a system-wide default profile, and can generate keyboard and mouse events for various button presses. The downside is that even though the software is open source, they don't actually have the source available for download anywhere which allows them to cripple the software until you pony up the $10 shareware fee. What worked worked well, so I parted with $10 and now have a useful working Creative remote.
Aside: I disagree with the design mentality of Logitech's Harmony remote control programming software. The remotes are designed on an activity-centric basis rather than a device-centered one like every other remote I've ever used which is annoying if you want to do something other than channel surf. When you start an activity, it turns on the appropriate devices and annoyingly turns off the ones that aren't needed for that activity (e.g. if I want to watch TV on the TV it turns off the projector for the HTPC.) Actual control of the remote is obfuscated behind four or five layers of user-friendly wizards that take a few minutes to navigate. One of these days I'll figure out how to make it behave.
If Microsoft backported their MCE remote extensions to Windows XP life would look great. For the rest of us, getting a remote control to work sucks and every step of the process you ask yourself if it's really worth it. I'm still not convinced it was, but at least you all will have a better starting point than I did.
-drasnor
I) Creative's Remote Center.
This driver was the most difficult to get, install, and use. Here's a step-by-step procedure:
1) Download the Compaq SoundBlaster Audigy/Live! driver CD. It's huge (~400MB) but you'll need it to get Creative's other remote control software to install.
2) Run the self-extracting archive and navigate to whatever folder you extracted it to. Run the Remote Center setup wizard only. Reboot.
3) Go to the Creative website. Download the latest version of Remote Center (1.40.26) and run the installer. It will complain that you don't have the right driver revision installed and quit.
4) Run an advanced search for the word 'remote' including hidden files and folders as well as system folders. One or more of them will be in your user profile's temporary directory. Navigate to that folder and run the setup wizard. Reboot.
5) Craft scripts similar to the one I found after Googling obscure forums.
Obviously this driver sucks. Moving on...
II) Intelliremote 1.0.
Intelliremote is an interesting piece of software that claims to read the MIDI events from Creative's funky remote implementation and generate Intellitype events just like decent multimedia keyboards. This would be nice since all my media players support Intellitype hooks. Intelliremote requires that Microsoft's Intellitype keyboard drivers are installed (Intellitype Pro 5.5) Unfortunately, the software is unmaintained and didn't work.
III) RM-X
RM-X contains a derivative of the Intelliremote source and comes in the form of a plugin for a single media player. You pick a media player from their list of supported players and configure your remote to control that player. RM-X supports a wider variety of remotes beyond the Creative ones and can generate keyboard events and such for those. RM-X worked but the volume control would only control Winamp's volume instead of the system volume and I really wanted something that could control the whole system. I could get that here for $15 but I didn't know if it would work or not.
IV) Girder
Girder costs money, more than the sum total I've spent on this project so far. It's also extreme overkill for what I want to do, plus last time I tried the trial the UI felt like it was put together by a high school student. Moving on...
V) Intelliremote 2.0
Just when I was despairing of finding the Windows analog of LIRC I finally find the winner. This version of Intelliremote actually works, supports profiles for different media players depending on what's highlighted as well as a system-wide default profile, and can generate keyboard and mouse events for various button presses. The downside is that even though the software is open source, they don't actually have the source available for download anywhere which allows them to cripple the software until you pony up the $10 shareware fee. What worked worked well, so I parted with $10 and now have a useful working Creative remote.
Aside: I disagree with the design mentality of Logitech's Harmony remote control programming software. The remotes are designed on an activity-centric basis rather than a device-centered one like every other remote I've ever used which is annoying if you want to do something other than channel surf. When you start an activity, it turns on the appropriate devices and annoyingly turns off the ones that aren't needed for that activity (e.g. if I want to watch TV on the TV it turns off the projector for the HTPC.) Actual control of the remote is obfuscated behind four or five layers of user-friendly wizards that take a few minutes to navigate. One of these days I'll figure out how to make it behave.
If Microsoft backported their MCE remote extensions to Windows XP life would look great. For the rest of us, getting a remote control to work sucks and every step of the process you ask yourself if it's really worth it. I'm still not convinced it was, but at least you all will have a better starting point than I did.
-drasnor
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In other news, all of my Intellitype keys now doublepress in annoying fashion (I press once, PC registers twice), even the ones on the keyboard. I'm sure this is some sort of driver configuration problem but I haven't found it yet.
-drasnor
I hope you get the last few items sorted out soon.
I guess I can consider myself lucky that I just needed to copy two drivers from an HP MCE to my laptop and made it work...
Why is the disk 400mb though? Is it full of bloat?
-drasnor
-drasnor