Kodi control with the Harmony 1100

I have a Harmony 1100 Remote Control which I bought when I had nearly a dozen different devices that I wanted to control (cable boxes and several tivos, as well as tv, receiver, dvd player, vcr, etc). I don’t have most of this stuff anymore, since I dumped the cable and started using Kodi. So I could probably live without the Harmony Remote, but I paid a lot of money for it, so I want it to work correctly. A big part of this project, therefore, was figuring out how to get that remote to control Kodi properly. I also wanted to improve the handling of keyboards, and understand better how I could use the configuration capabilities in Kodi to get better control.

The Harmony remote software for the Harmony 1100 permits assigning to each hard button or touchscreen button, a “command”, and a “device” to which the command applies.

When a “device” is set up for control by the Harmony remote, one selects what type of device it is from the Harmony database. The database has various device types (tv, dvd player etc), including one called Media Center PC. Within each device type there are a number of specific “devices” with manufacturer (Sony, Samsung) and model number. For the device type Media Center PC, there is a manufacturer “Plex” and model “Plex Player”. There are other “manufacturers” in the database that look promising (like “kodi”), but they turn out not to have anything useful in them. The only one that has been useful for me is the one called “Plex”.

The database for a device, in this case “Plex”, has a set of what it calls “commands”, which to the user look like “Play”, “Pause”, “F3”, “Channel Up”, etc. When configuring the buttons on the remote, one can choose from that offered set of commands, and no others. For other devices with manufacturer supplied remote controls, one can create ones own “commands” by having the harmony app learn from the remote, but since there is no manufacturer supplied physical remote control for Kodi, the commands in the database are the only ones which can be assigned. One has to make do with the set of commands which are provided.
Continue reading Kodi Keymap Files →