Using a wii remote on XBMC
For the last week or two I’ve been experimenting with XBMC and trying to control it with a wii remote. XBMC stands for Xbox Media Center. It was originally designed as a media center front end to be installed on a Microsoft XBox gaming console. This enabled the Xbox to be used sort of like a typical Windows Media Extender. In actual fact, XBMC is more of a media receiver in that it doesn’t directly act as an extension of MCE. Functionally speaking they are the same though. Xbmc connects to shared media and acts as portal or user interface for displaying digital computer files (ie photos, videos, music) on tvs or monitors where there isn’t a computer. Two advantages of the original xbmc are that it allowed people to use an existing piece of equipment (the xbox) instead of buying a new extender, and the user interface is generally regarded as being vastly superior to those found in Windows media extenders.
Since the xbox runs on linux, it was only a matter of time before xbmc was ported to a linux distribution. A person can now install linux on their PC, and then install and run xbmc. This is what I’ve been doing on my laptop. I installed the latest version of Ubuntu, installed xbmc and wham! instant media receiver. So now our laptop has a nice front end for viewing media that is stored on our network (on our NAS, FreeNAS to be exact). The next step in this enterprise is to set up the laptop as an extender for our tv in the livingroom. One of the last hurdles has been configuring one of our wii remotes to act as the remote control for the laptop. With this setup we can leave the laptop at the tv and use a wii remote to access all of our media via xbmc. I have no idea if this is a useful feature but it’s been a free experiment (I will have to purchase a $8 cable though).
So here’s my quick note on how to get the wii remote working xbmc on linux. There’s not much to it but I was certainly confused with the process. Maybe this will help someone.
1. first you need to ensure that bluetooth is working. I had to install bluetooth via System - Synaptic Package Manager
2. my bluetooth usb dongle worked after #1 so next was the wii remote. For this I relied entirely upon this information on the ubuntu forums.
3. to clarify how to get the wii remote address, you open a terminal, type lswm and then press 1+2 on your remote (without first powering the remote)
4. next you have to install the wiiremote client for xbmc. go to system - synaptic package manager and install “xbmc-eventclients-wiiremote”. It will install the necessary dependants. However, if you have a newer version of Ubuntu, you will have libbluetooth3 on your system whereas the client expects libbluetooth2.
5. if you need to get libbluetooth2, download the package from here. Click on the downloaded .deb package to install it. Now you can install the eventclient in step 4.
6. You’re probably ready to rock now. Open up a terminal and enter “xbmc-wiiremote”. Press 1+2 on the remote to connect it.
7. open xbmc and you should get a message saying that a bluetooth device is connected.
Voila. I think there are people that are trying to improve the wiiremote functionality by using the motion sensors (which I think requires an IR port). As well, you can edit the keymap.xml to change how xbmc responds to the wii controls.
