Finishing Touches:
If you’ve made it this far, everything must be working. Now we’ll add some niceties. First off, what happens if XBMC and BeyondTV both happen to be open at the same time? Chaos! End of the World! Ok, not really, but it could get confusing. You’re merrily pressing buttons on the remote, but both applications are reacting to it. That’s no good. EventGhost to the rescue again! We can fix this.
Right-click on “Configuration Tree” and select “Add Macro”. This time we want to select “Exclusive enable a folder/macro” which is under the EventGhost folder. Click “OK”. Now it asks you which folder to enable.
This is why we created the “Apps” folder way back at the start of this tutorial. Without it, EventGhost wouldn’t know what folders to enable or disable. Scroll down the list and select the XBMC folder and click “OK”.
The right panel shows a new macro now. It knows what do now, we just need to tell it when to do it. Start up XBMC and then exit out of it. Look at the left panel of EventGhost and look for “Task.Activated.XBMC”.
Drag that over to the “Enable exclusive: XBMC” macro and drop it there.
This tells EventGhost that when the XBMC program is activated, ignore BeyondTV. Meaning that BeyondTV won’t receive the remote signals if it’s running.
Now we do the opposite for BeyondTV. Add a new “Exclusive enable” macro, and select the BeyondTV folder this time. Start and exit BeyondTV and drag the “Task.Activated.BTVD3DShell” item over and drop it on the macro.
The last step is setting up a hotkey to start the apps from the desktop. I set mine up so that pressing the “1” button on the remote launches XBMC, and the “2” button launches BeyondTV. Here’s how.
Right-click on “Configuration Tree” and choose “Add Macro”. This time we need the “Start Application” macro located under the “System” folder. Click OK.
First let’s set up XBMC. Click on the folder button to the right of the “Executable” box and find the xbmc program. It’s usually under C:\Program files\XBMC\XBMC.exe. Leave “Command line options” blank, and select the working directory – usually C:\Program files\XBMC.
Leave the rest of the options the way they are and click “OK”. Press the “1” button on your remote (or another button you want to use to start the app). Again drag the HauppaugeIR.1 event over from the left panel and drop it on the macro.
At this point if you’ve done everything correctly, pressing the “1” button on the remote should bring up XBMC.
Repeat these steps to add a new macro and assign the “2” button to start BeyondTV. The settings should look like this, depending on where you have BeyondTV installed:
The macro, when finished, will look like this:
That’s all there is to it! Now you can start XBMC or BeyondTV with the remote from the desktop by pressing the “1” or “2” button respectively. Last but not least, select the “File” menu in EventGhost and select “Save” to give it a filename and save your work. Otherwise you’ll end up like me and have to redo the whole thing again from scratch! I save mine every night now to my account on Backup To The Web.
I got linked here from Google, specifically to the last page of this article. I needed a visual walkthrough to get the Enable Exclusively part done. Thanks for posting this.
With that said, I’m in the same situation as you were in when you wrote this article. Last night I got my setup just like I wanted it. Remote (Harmony One) was working perfectly (at least for XBMC, which is all I worked on). This morning I was doing a bit of work on it when it locked up hard and wouldn’t do anything for 5 minutes. That’s when I reset the computer manually. Later this morning I realized that my EventGhost profile had never been saved, and that I was back to square one. Needless to say I’m saving religiously now.
Going to be resetting up the XBMC configuration tonight…and adding Boxee as well this weekend. Thanks to this nice little article I’ll be able to avoid crossover between the two. Btw…the way I switch between apps is setup the Harmony One with two different devices, one called XBMC and one called Boxee. Then I just have one of the soft buttons programmed to be the Power Button, which tells Eventghost to fire up the program. That way the button configurations are completely separate, so I can change one without affecting the other. While they are similar, they are still different enough to warrant a separate profile. The IR codes the remote sends aren’t different, but the labels on the buttons are slightly different, and it’s nice to match up what is displayed on the remote with what’s on screen.