How to launch programs with HID
(Alternative descriptions for Google: How to launch applications with HID, How to start programs with HID, How to start applications with HID, cannot start program with HID, cannot focus explorer.exe HID)
Short answer: Don’t bother, try this instead.
While HID seems quite a capable program, it fails to do one basic thing easily – launch an application based on a key stroke or button press.
It says it’s capable of doing it using the ‘system-wide keys’ on the ‘alternate input’ tab, but this tab may be unavailable if you use keyboard control option. (You can try generic HID instead.)
I could not get this feature to work reliably; and ended up giving up on this application and moving to a nice freeware program called AutoHotKey from http://www.autohotkey.com/
To make it work, you need to add a few lines to a text file such as these:
^a::run “E:\Program Files\WinFast\WFDTV\WFFM.exe”
!#enter::run “C:\Program Files\Devnz\GBPVR\PVRX2.exe” -noframe
^+t::run “E:\Program Files\WinFast\WFDTV\DVBTAP.exe”
^g::run “C:\Program Files\Devnz\GBPVR\PVRX2.exe” -direct “TV Guide”
^+z::send p
^e::run “F:\Recorded Shows”
^i::run “G:\Internet Shows”
^m::run “C:\Program Files\foobar2000\foobar2000.exe”
For example, pressing the “Radio” button on my generic MCE remote sends Ctrl A as a standard keyboard stroke. The first line above will start WFFM.exe when I press this Radio button.
One of the programs, WinFast DTV, responds to the letter P to enable Pan&Scan; but the remote’s aspect button sends Ctrl Shift Z, so the line above that has ^+z catches this and instead sends the letter P.
The program can be set up with lots of scripting etc, but I haven’t needed to get that far into it yet. It lacks a nice programming interface so it’s a little fiddly copying and pasting application paths from their icons; but it works 🙂 (It looks like it obsoletes Iolo Macro Magic, my previous tool of choice.)
To find out what keys your remote sends, there is a handy ‘recording’ program included with it that shows you the actions you’ve performed.
Have fun!