Archive:EventGhost to use a MCE remote (Windows)

Among the many aspects that contributed in making XBMC a success, we can surely count its ease of control its ease of control through either the standard control pad or the Xbox remote control. Under Windows things are not as simple out of the box but this tutorial will attempt to guide you through the necessary steps, in order to achieve a similarly seamless control experience.

EventGhost, what it is and why we need it

Straight from its webpage, "EventGhost is an open-source automation tool for MS Windows, that can be extended through plugins." In layman's terms, EventGhost monitors everything that happens in your computer. Opening applications, changing focus from one app to another, pressing keys, pressing remote buttons, and so on and so forth. All this constitutes events and EventGhost can associate actions to execute to each and every event happening in your machine.

It's a really powerful tool and this tutorial will barely scratch the surface of what it's capable of. Those interested in more information would do well by heading to its homepage. Thanks to the work of topfs2 and kirs, a plugin for XBMC is available for EventGhost and that's the key of what we are going to do, since EventGhost is thus able to act as an EventClient for XBMC's EventServer.

Download, installation and basic configuration

In order to use EventGhost with a MCE Remote, we need to do two things:

• Download and install EventGhost latest beta from here. For reference, this tutorial has been written using version 0.3.6.1487.
• Activate the EventServer inside XBMC, as explained here.

To be continued... with screeshots for all significant steps.