Tag Archives: remote control

XBMC – navigating movies by numbers on remote

XBMC showing movies by DVD

XBMC showing movies by DVD

If you’ve navigated movies in XBMC by clicking on the navigation buttons – STOP!

Scrolling through a lot of movies takes time, particularly if you want to navigate to the M or N movies (middle). You could change views to Thumbnail view, but there’s a better option when you’re in Poster Wrap.

Each number on the remote control also has letters associated with it. For example on my HP Windows Media Centre remote the letters ABC are on top of the #2. If I press 2 once XBMC jumps to the first movie beginning with the letter A. If I hit 2 a second time it jumps to the first movie with the letter B. A third press of 2 jumps to movies beginning with the letter C. So to get to movies beginning with the letter M I hit the 6 key. Very quick, easy navigation.

Scroll through movies to show off your collection to friends, but if you want efficient navigation use those number keys on your remote.

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Filed under Technology, XBMC

UK XBMC Hardware – Pulse Eight

Pulse-Eight is a XBMC hardware developer

Pulse-Eight has some neat XBMC-related hardware

I came across an interesting company this morning that sells hardware specifically around XBMC. One of their products is the pictured USB – CEC Adapter that lets you control your TV, Blueray player, and home theatre unit from XBMC, and lets you do other cool stuff like control XBMC from your television remote.

Pulse-Eight also sells a remote with a keyboard on the other side – not a bad idea since it’s pretty hard with a regular remote to click on long strings of letters in the XBMC keyboard UI (of course a regular wireless keyboard can do it, but who wants one of those sitting in their living room).

I was surprised to learn that Pulse-Eight is based in the United Kingdom (UK) since they had all prices in US dollars – it just means they’re savvy enough to tailor to markets everywhere. The web UI for Pulse-Eight actually leaves a little bit to be desired. For example: the navigation on the top doesn’t take you to one page showing all their products. I found that they sold HTPC cases only by accident because there was side navigation to it off one of their pages.

There isn’t a huge selection of items. Actually there isn’t much variety at all, but everything Pulse-Eight does sells appears to be made by them. They also maintain a blog and forums.

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Filed under Entertainment, Hardware, Technology, XBMC