More on iRed Lite VLC Setup

Here is some more detail on how we setup iRed Lite to use the Apple Remote with VLC.  

There is a default set of actions for VLC but these are relatively limited as they only cater for the 6 basic buttons on the Apple Remote.  The main functionality that is missing, for viewing movies, is fast forward and rewind capabilities.  The Left and Right buttons on the Apple Remote activate Previous and Next.  Although useful for music, e.g. in a playlist, these are not useful for a movie.  There is no way to move forwards or backwards within the movie via defined Applescript commands: Next restarts the movie from the beginning.  More on that later.

The screenshot below shows the iRed Lite setup for toggling VLC in or out of Fullscreen mode.  Often, when  a movie starts, it is in a small window and the Mac screen may also be zoomed in, especially if using Finder to choose a movie file from a folder.

We used simple Applescript commands to combine the Mac Zoom Out and VLC Fullscreen operations into one iRed Lite action which we assigned to the Up arrow (single click) on the Apple Remote.  The logic was that the Up button would increase the screen size.  This button also toggles the VLC Fullscreen feature off again, to go to back to a smaller window, in which case it doesn't matter if the Mac gets another Zoom Out command.

I should say that we have changed the default operation of the Apple Remote Up and Down buttons to require double-clicking to operate the VLC volume control.  This is because we use the Logitech Harmony 525 remote to emulate the Apple Remote, and the Logitech remote has dedicated Volume Up/Down/Mute buttons which we have programmed to operate the Sony TV directly rather than the VLC or Mac system volume.  Thus, the TV volume control is our primary volume control and the other volume controls stay at a set level.

The reason we left the VLC volume controls accessible, albeit via double clicking, is that it is sometimes necessary to adjust the VLC volume.  We found that if the VLC volume is too high (much over 100%), the sound can be distorted from the TV.  We found it better to keep the VLC volume moderate, and adjust the TV volume up a bit.  This also makes the VLC volume similar to other applications, e.g. EyeTV, so there are no sudden jumps in volume when switching between applications.

The tricky part of setting up VLC with iRed Lite was activating the Fast Forward and Rewind functions. Although these are available in VLC via menus or via hotkeys, they are not available via Applescript.  So, we configured iRed Lite Actions to operate via simulating keystrokes, as per the screen shot below for the new action Skip Fwd.

The default hotkey in VLC for Skip Fwd is Option-Command-Right but we found, for some reason, that this didn't work reliably in iRed Lite (It should have.) as it sometimes triggered the Next function which reverted to the start of the video rather than skipping forward a few seconds.  As a workaround, we redefined the HotKey for SkipFwd in VLC to be a single letter "a".

(The unreliable operation of the Option-Command-Right hotlkey combination arose when we entered this as a "keystroke" type action in iRed Lite.  It may have worked had we entered it as a keystroke command in an Applescript type action, but we didn't know how to enter a multi-key keystroke via Applescript at that stage, and we haven't tried it since.  By all means, give it a try before altering the VLC hotkeys as we have done.)

We wanted the Skip Fwd to skip a reasonable time ahead, so we actually allocated the hotkey "a" to be a "Medium forward jump" in VLC which equated to a 1 minute jump.

We also allocated the hotkey of "b" to "Short backwards jump" (about 10 seconds) and "p" to "Medium backwards jump" (also 1 minute), the latter being activated by a double-click of the Left remote button.  This combination provided good fast-forward and rewind control of VLC from the Apple Remote, and the larger jump in the forward direction made it similar to the behaviour of EyeTV which we also use frequently.