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This $10 air mouse remote drastically changes using your PC from your couch

Deleted member 12790

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These things are so freaking cheap, they're like $10 on ebay, and they're the perfect companion to any PC in the living room. They become your remote control for the entire setup. They're both air mice, meaning you can press a button in the middle to make it act like a wiimote to control your mouse on screen, and a full keyboard on the back, and they are universal IR remotes, meaning they can learn functions from your TV remote.

So the same remote can control your PC, and your TV and even your sound system all at the same time. And it's seen by your PC as a standard keyboard and mouse and MCE, so you can even use this stuff on your PC's bios menu if you had to. I've actually used one of these remotes to access my PC bios in a pinch.

Air mice remotes used to be so expensive and hard to find. I got my first air mouse remote in 2004 after watching a mythTV "home of the future" demo where a mythTV server was used as the central media hub for an entire home. The video they put together had people using an air mouse remote to control their TVs. Back in those days, microsoft was pushing windows MCE, which was a built in ten-foot UI for windows XP, and they had an MCE air mouse remote from gyration. But it was super expensive, like $150. Despite that, I wound up with four, and used them all up until they basically disintegrated.

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These generic, $10 clones they have flooded on ebay now are a damn godsend. I have dozens upon dozens of them, when I build people raspberry pi kodi machines, I throw them in with them. They're one of the very best things to pick up if you're into PC gaming, because they fit right in with the TV. They solve all the keyboard/mouse problems you might have for fringe cases where steam input fails.

In addition to these remotes being universal and learning remotes, you can also remap any key or button on the remote with your PC using a program like AutoHotKey or EventGhost in windows, or by altering XKB in linux.

Absolutely essential to anybody who uses their PC in their living room with their main TV. These things work on anything that can recognize a mouse and keyboard, btw, including consoles, phones, and even things like the steam link.
 
Motwera

Motwera

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Oct 27, 2017
886
$10 USD?! The one I found at Walmart Canada costed me $30 CAD, I was skeptical about it when I originally bought it. No one seemed to want to use it in the living room except me...
 

Deleted member 36578

Dec 21, 2017
26,561
I've been TV living room PC gaming for years now and I think I'm a fool for never looking into these before.
 
PARAdoja

PARAdoja

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Oct 27, 2017
574
I bought a generic C120 a couple of days ago to repurpose a Brix as an HTPC.

After your video, I regret not buying one with backlight and IR sensor lol

Well, not that we have a lot of variety in Argentina.

But the C120 seems to have an IR LED, so maybe I can do something with it...
 
Lobster Roll

Lobster Roll

signature-less, now and forever
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Sep 24, 2019
34,380
Yeah but just last week I tried to perform gastric bypass surgery and couldn't figure it out. There's absolutely no way I'm going to ramp up the difficulty to try my hand at figuring out how to get a PC connected to my TV.
 

Deleted member 8468

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I think I'm going to pick one of these up, they're certainly cheap enough.

Being home more over the last few weeks I've been moving the PC into the living room for both flat gaming and VR in a larger space. I had been using the Asus Smart Gesture app on my phone, but if I can set this up for my TV and/or AV receiver I could also eliminate some remotes. I have a newer LG OLED with WebOS, can the gesture mouse work for that as well? Or would it need the USB dongle for that?
 
lt519

lt519

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Oct 25, 2017
8,064
Any hope of one of these things working with a Vizio soundbar?

Been using the K400 keyboard/trackpad combo for 8 years now but could be convinced to consolidate if it got rid of my soundbar remote.
 
OP
OP

Deleted member 12790

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Baconmonk said:
I think I'm going to pick one of these up, they're certainly cheap enough.

Being home more over the last few weeks I've been moving the PC into the living room for both flat gaming and VR in a larger space. I had been using the Asus Smart Gesture app on my phone, but if I can set this up for my TV and/or AV receiver I could also eliminate some remotes. I have a newer LG OLED with WebOS, can the gesture mouse work for that as well? Or would it need the USB dongle for that?
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you need the USB dongle to use mouse and keyboard features, otherwise you're limited to the 5 IR buttons. But you could plug the dongle into your TV and it'll work that way. On my samsung TV, if I plug the dongle into the USB port, a mouse cursor pops up on my TV and I can use the air remote like you'd expect. If you, for example, have a samsung TV with a steam link app built in, you can control your entire PC and samsung TV UI with the same dongle.
 
Afrikan

Afrikan

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Oct 28, 2017
16,990
LG's Magic remote for their TVs are a God send... so to be able to have a similar feature for my PC/Laptop for that cheap sounds great!

This thread would have been perfect for that other poster that was criticizing PC gaming from the couch.
 
OP
OP

Deleted member 12790

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lt519 said:
Any hope of one of these things working with a Vizio soundbar?
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I use mine with a vizio sound bar. I dedicated 2 of the buttons on the remote to volume up and volume down with the sound bar. To do this, I taught it the commands from the vizio remote. My vizio remote uses IR communication, though, dunno if the newer ones do as well.
 
lt519

lt519

Member
Oct 25, 2017
8,064
Krejlooc said:
I use mine with a vizio sound bar. I dedicated 2 of the buttons on the remote to volume up and volume down with the sound bar. To do this, I taught it the commands from the vizio remote. My vizio remote uses IR communication, though, dunno if the newer ones do as well.
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Yeah, I was just looking at that Pepper Jobs one and realized you program it by IR learning. It's been like 20 years since I've touched a universal remote, seems they've changed lol. I'm gonna grab that one, looks cool, thanks for the thread.

Edit: lol gdi ship date of April 28, will be a nice surprise when it shows up because I'll totally forget about it
 
OP
OP

Deleted member 12790

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tnuiipoaadnrv said:
I mean I didn't watch it but there's literally a model number in the title of the Youtube video, and what little I skimmed of the OP reads like an ad. Apparently you guys are on 3 or 4 levels of irony so I'll just see myself out.
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the model number in the video is quite literally meaningless. This same remote goes by dozens of names from dozens of different sellers. Again, it's generic, it's a design lots of manufacturers are cloning and flooding ebay with. This is like being upset that someone said "q-tip" when recommending cotton swabs.
 
Flandy

Flandy

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Oct 25, 2017
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Would be cool if you could somehow tie a macro to a button on this that automatically opens Steam Big Picture mode
 
kubev

kubev

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Oct 25, 2017
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Krejlooc said:
the model number in the video is quite literally meaningless. This same remote goes by dozens of names from dozens of different sellers. Again, it's generic, it's a design lots of manufacturers are cloning and flooding ebay with. This is like being upset that someone said "q-tip" when recommending cotton swabs.
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I typed in the model number on Amazon and saw a LOT of results for what basically looked like the same remote with some small differences, albeit at wildly varied prices.
 
OP
OP

Deleted member 12790

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Flandy said:
Would be cool if you could somehow tie a macro to a button on this that automatically opens Steam Big Picture mode
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you can do this with autohotkey or eventghost. You can make the shortcut buttons on the remote launch anything you want. If you want it to launch anything you want. Example, there's an internet explorer button on the remote, that when I press, launches firefox. you can make any button on the remote launch a full script with autohotkey, to do complex things, if you really want to dive into it. Autohotkey makes this thing fully programmable with an actual scripting language.
 
OP
OP

Deleted member 12790

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kubev said:
I typed in the model number on Amazon and saw a LOT of results for what basically looked like the same remote with some small differences, albeit at wildly varied prices.
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and? That's just one manufacturer, you can type "air mouse remote" and you'll get way, way more results. The "model number" in this case is just one random instance of one random manufacturer making a clone of a freely available design.
 
OP
OP

Deleted member 12790

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JDHarbs said:
Now would these work well with a Wii emulator?
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no, the wii does inside-out positional tracking with 1:1 millimeter precision. This uses dead reckoning. They are not the same kind of tracking technologies. For example, this only tracks in two dimensions, the wiimote tracks in three dimensions.
 
Flandy

Flandy

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Krejlooc said:
you can do this with autohotkey or eventghost. You can make the shortcut buttons on the remote launch anything you want. If you want it to launch anything you want. Example, there's an internet explorer button on the remote, that when I press, launches firefox. you can make any button on the remote launch a full script with autohotkey, to do complex things, if you really want to dive into it. Autohotkey makes this thing fully programmable with an actual scripting language.
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Ohh I'll have to look into this some more. Do you know if it would be possible to set up a command that switched the output device? The normal way I switch is Windows Key + P from Extend then to Second Screen only.
 
TeenageFBI

TeenageFBI

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Oct 25, 2017
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I've wanted something like this since I bought my LG TV and saw how the magic remote puts a mouse icon onscreen, but you can only use it for the TV's OS, not Windows.

Thanks for the thread!
 
OP
OP

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Flandy said:
Ohh I'll have to look into this some more. Do you know if it would be possible to set up a command that switched the output device? The normal way I switch is Windows Key + P from Extend then to Second Screen only.
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you can map any keyboard combination to any button on the remote. So you could just map windows key + P to a button. Or, you could write a batch file that called an external program, then set the key to call that batch file. Or a number of alternative ways to accomplish the same goal.

One of the keys on my remote I map to windows + tab, so I can pull up the window switching utility, so I can switch between full screen applications on my PC with a single button press, like Kodi and steam.
 

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reminds of the my old boxee box remote. that thing was awesome at the time. i didn't know there were so cheap, def beats the logitech trackpad/keyboard i have which even though its smaller than a normal kb, its not much smaller. its probably easier to type on because the method of typing is more like a sidekick.
tnuiipoaadnrv said:
Oh yes I'm super upset lol. Okay, guy from the internet. I appreciate your genuine, good-faith OP that you totally wrote to help us out.
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take the L and move on
 
OP
OP

Deleted member 12790

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Quote said:
reminds of the my old boxee box remote. that thing was awesome at the time. i didn't know there were so cheap, def beats the logitech trackpad/keyboard i have which even though its smaller than a normal kb, its not much smaller.

take the L and move on
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The people behind Kodi once manufactured a version of these themselves, when they sold "The Little Black Box," which was kodi's set top box. It would come with a custom kodi branded version of these remotes.
 
Vagabond

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Oct 26, 2017
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These are indeed legit for not only my Shield TV, but cheap android boxes as well. Havent tried on my Amazon Fire, but it works or so I heard.

If someone could figure out how to make those stupid useless Steamboxes remote streaming boxes for your PC, this would be a godsend.
 
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