Misleading error/warning about Remote Buddy
#1
Hi,

I'm the developer of Remote Buddy and I've just seen that XBMC is prompting users to remove Remote Buddy.

Whoever came up with the idea to add special detection for Remote Buddy and add a prompt to users and pointing to the Remote Buddy FAQ on how to uninstall it: please stop doing stuff like this in the future and get in touch with the developers of products you are experiencing a problem with. It saves you, your users and the other developers a lot of time and grief (and an unnecessary loss of sales in the case of the other developer) and will help you deliver a better product that your users will enjoy using more.

That said, here's what is happening: the current implementation of XBMC's Apple Remote supports thinks there is no Apple Remote when you have Remote Buddy's driver installed. Remote Buddy's driver, however, provides the only, full implementation of an Apple Remote emulation on the whole platform. It generates the exact same events as the original Apple Remote. The consequence is that every application with their own Apple Remote support can be used with Remote Buddy's Apple Remote emulation. In fact, even on computers that don't ship with an Apple Remote - like the Mac Pro - you can use Apple Remote only apps like iAlertU.

Every application - except XBMC and its forks. Q: Why is that?

A: XBMC's code is currently looking for the driver by name:

IOServiceNameMatching("AppleIRController")

while everybody else on the platform is looking for it by actual class:

IOServiceMatching("AppleIRController")

Since Remote Buddy's driver of course isn't named AppleIRController (that name is already taken by Apple's own driver), but behaves like the AppleIRController class, it will be found when looking for the class, but can't currently be found when looking for it by name.

And, really, that little change is all it takes. The Plex team already made it.

I would therefore like to kindly ask the developers of XBMC to make the same change to achieve compatibility not only with Remote Buddy's driver but also with potential future versions of Apple's driver (which may be subclasses of AppleIRController and possibly no longer be locatable by the AppleIRController name either). I'd also like to kindly ask that the inappropriate and misleading "Please remove Remote Buddy"-requester be removed from all future releases since Remote Buddy really isn't to be blamed.

Thanks.

Best regards,
Felix Schwarz
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#2
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#3
Quote:And, really, that little change is all it takes. The Plex team already made it.
Davilla, that is quite the informative commit message, wonder how we missed it.
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#4
Thanks guys for your replies! I'll send you an email shortly.

Best regards,
Felix Schwarz
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Misleading error/warning about Remote Buddy1