Apple TV Remote 4th generation / Siri Remote

1st Official Post

    Hi!

    I'm running Libreelec 9.01 on my Raspberry Pi 3b+. Everythings works fine so far eventhough i am pretty much a noob in technical questions.

    That is probably why I want to use an Apple TV Remote (4th generation, Siri Bluetooth remote) to control Libreelec. For some reason it just won't pair the remote with my raspberry pi.


    I've checked many websites but I found nothing about that new Apple bluetooth remote. Can somebody help me out? Is it even possible to use that remote on Libreelec?

    Thanks so much!

    • Official Post

    The 4th generation AppleTV remote uses IR for navigation and BT audio for siri voice commands. So it's not a "BT remote" that can be paired.

    Greetings,

    After running Kodi since the xbmc days on an OG xbox, and ultimately moving to an AppleTV running MrMc, which unfortunately has not had any updates for years, I've finally moved to LibreELEC on a RPi4. One problem though, I really, really, really miss my AppleTV remote.


    I've been searching for a while on whether it could work with the RPi4 and LibreELEC and came across this site, which shows that it can work on Linux and that it does in fact send it's commands over bluetooth, not just the audio - https://github.com/Yanndroid/SiriRemote-Linux


    I'm sure there is someone out there, much, much smarter than I and could someone get this working with the LibreELEC builds. I'm happy to be a guinea pig and/or be guided on what I need to do if needed.


    Cheers,


    Jason.

    Ok, so I managed to get it working on OSMC, but I much prefer LibreElec, so I went down the path of creating a docker container with alpine, but had a bit of an issue getting it all working, so I tried minideb. I included all the dependencies, gave it privileged access and got the docker container to allow the bluetooth device to connect via dbus to the host os.


    I can run the script required to convert the appletv remote responses to HID, but get nothing working via the remote. I'm guessing it's because the python script that is doing the conversion to hid isn't running on the host and there isn't translating. I can monitor the dbus on libreelec and see the data coming via the docker container.


    Any help? :) chewitt I know you looked at this previously. Any assistance would be greatly appreciated :)