Winamp & Shoutcast Forums - A guide to using Winamp with Hauppage WinTV remotes!

I have a Hauppage WinTV PVR-350 card, and one of the things it comes with is a nice shiney silver remote.
Now this remote controls much more than just WinTV, it can also control Media Player, PowerDVD etc so I thought I'd find out how that works and make it work for Winamp.

The first thing you need to do is located a file called irremote.ini - it should be in your root windows folder (c:\windows on most systems). This file contains a list of all the different remote types, what codes map to what command tags, and which command tags do what for which application.

First off, there is one problem with getting Winamp working with this - the IR program requires that the window title of the application you want to control should be constant. I asked about that in this thread and was recommended this plugin which allows you to set Winamp's window title. I chose to just go with "Winamp".

Back to the file, and you can safely ignore the bit about code mapping, it doesn't need altering. Search for the "[Applications]" marker in the file. There is a list under this in the format of "<application>=" which determines which applications the IR program should pass commands to.
At the end of the list, add a line reading "Winamp=", assuming you set the Winamp window title to just say "Winamp".

Now you need to define which keys on the remote convert to which keypresses in Winamp. To do this, you place a marker called "[Winamp]" anywhere in the file below the applications list. Mine is right at the end of the file. Again "[Winamp]" is assuming you just set your window title to "Winamp". My definitions look like this:

code:


[Winamp]

VOLUP={up}

VOLDOWN={down}

STOP=v

PAUSE=c

PLAY=x

REWIND={left}

FASTFWD={right}

SKIPFWD=b

SKIPREV=z

GRNPOWER={alt}{F4}

That simply defines the obvious keys, plus sets the power button to close Winamp. For a full list of special codes the irremote.ini file uses, see this rather eyewatering German page.

Once you're happy, save the file, go into the Hauppage folder in the start menu, and select "Restart IR". Make sure Winamp is the focused application (ie. it's selected on the windows taskbar) and it should work fine.

The end.