Suggestion: Make VRD remote control friendly

[stevehiner]

Perhaps I just haven't tried hard enough but I was thinking it would be really nice if I could control VRD using the remote for my home theater PC. I'm a heavy BeyondTV user and I'd love to be able to edit shows right on my TV but I don't want to have to grab the mouse and keyboard to do it.

I was thinking that if VRD was changed to make it work with common remote controls I would be able to do everything from my couch. I suppose it might be possible to set it up manually using keyboard shortcuts but then it would only help me, not all other users.

I think this would be a nice selling point for BeyondTV users. BTV has a way to call an arbitrary program for archiving. If VRD supported my remote then I could use the archive command in BTV to open up VRD, tweak the commercials and save out a new copy. In addition to supporting the remote commands we would also have to prepare a batch file to call VRD since I think BTV only passes the name of the MPG file, not the chapter file to the program it calls. With a batch file we could check for a chapter file and pass that to VRD instead.

What do you think? I assume it's too big a change for this version but maybe the next major release could have it, not that I want you to postpone it. Any other BTV users that would like to see this as a feature? Am I missing something obvious that makes this work as-is?

From a workflow standpoint it would be great to be in BTV:
Drop a blank DVD into the system
Find a show and select Archive in BTV
VRD opens the chapter file
user tweaks commercial locations
adds to DVD
switch back to BTV and select another show
select archive in BTV
same instance of VRD opens the new chapter file
user tweaks commercial locations
adds to DVD
Burn DVD right from the couch using only the remote

Of course it would also be nice to queue things up in the batch manager the same way if I don't want to burning a DVD.

BTV has a $30 DVD burning plug-in but it's very simple and it doesn't remove commercials so I don't use it unless I've already cleaned up the file using VRD.

[DanR]

Steve, if you don't mind, how about reposting this message after the release is out. The GUI and feature set are pretty much locked down now. But, I'd enjoy discussing this with you after we come up for air

[pistnbroke]

Very possible when you have keyboard shortcuts built into program. I use a program called " HIP " it passes on keyboard shortcuts to a remote key on your remote once setup.
I currently use it for Mediaportal but it will pretty much work with almost anything as along as it will recongnize your remote..

http://www.byremote.com.au/HIP/ if anyone is interested...

[DanR]

A number of people have also had success with a program called girder.

[stevehiner]

I use a firefly remote from Snapstream. They have a configuration file that lets me map the keys based on the active program. I guess I just need to sit down for a while and figure out which buttons to map to the existing keyboard shortcuts. Most likely I can get nearly everything mapped, the one thing I'll likely have issues with is selecting a location and name for the output file.