EventGhost

Hello all skilled pluginmakers here,

i'm desperately in need of plugin for controling windows 7 x64 windows media center from remote independently. So i cen use mouse and keyboard to work on my primary screen with eclipse or microsoft word and - this applications obviously need focus. And control media center on secondary screen (unfocused) with remote via event ghost.

Thank you for plugin!

This would be much appreciated!

Exactly what I need too, have my girfriend watch tv, skip channels, etc while I do the hard work in Eclipse / Visual Studio etc
I would love to implement this myself, but it appears MCE lacks a controlling interface.

MCE probably needs a background app that acts as a socket server and allows EventGhost to control MCE.
This "control MCE" might be the difficult part as I don't see a generic control API inside the MCE SDK (6). There are some ways to interact with MCE like MediaCenterEnvironment.AudioMixer, MediaCenterEnvironment.MediaExperience.Transport etc. Still, navigating a UI Dialog doesn't seem to be supported without MCE having focus and sending keystrokes.

Some more digging.
It should be possible to send keys to an application without focus. This might be an easier route.
Will keep you posted.

I started development on a new plugin.

Requirements:
1) EventGhost with plugin "Microsoft MCE Remote" and disabling the HID service (option inside this plugin).
2) The new plugin MceNoFocusActions (i might need another name for this)
3) An additional program that runs in the system tray and is informed by this new plugin about the buttons pressed, this program then posts messages in WMC's message queue using PostMessage.

I was hoping to do all this in the plugin using python and the winapi bindings, but I failed, maybe later.

It's not ready for deployment as I'm at a loss on how to send certain buttons, for now only the following buttons work:
All Numeric buttons
Stop, Play, Pause
Rewind, Forward
Replay, Skip
Up, Down
So pretty much all the buttons that already worked with the default setup....

I will post updates here, or I might create a blog post about my progress on my own site.

Sounds great, i hope you figure at least right and left keys, with that set of keys it will be useful for me at least!

Congratulations on figuring out how to communicate with mce without it having focus, i will definitely look at source code when you release it!

BTW it is quite long time since my initial post and i now run dedicated mce machine

I was able to get the Up and Down keys to work by sending mouse wheel scroll messages.
The left and right scroll (horizontal scroll) do not work...
The mouse up/down also doesn't work while watching live TV; it doesn't trigger the OSD guide.

Still al lot needs to be done..

any update on this?

elvo,
How are you getting WMC on the secondary screen?

I've quit working on this plugin as I couldn't find a way to reliable control windows media center. I was unable to overcome the problems mentioned earlier. Now I'm just left with switching focus every now and then between media center and my other apps. If I really need to separate the two I use a virtual machine. No real solutions.

Livin wrote:any update on this?

elvo,
How are you getting WMC on the secondary screen?

Move it to secondary display and press alt+enter (or maximze window )

evlo wrote:

Livin wrote:any update on this?

elvo,
How are you getting WMC on the secondary screen?

Move it to secondary display and press alt+enter (or maximze window )

Will it remember or do I need to do this each time? This is in my living room and I need to to "just work" without intervention.

Yes, you can try it yourself.