Modifying Boxee keybindings

Thursday, October 21st, 2010

Boxee is a pretty awesome media player for Linux. Now, I don’t have a remote to control it, but I do have a Logitech DiNovo Wireless keyboard with a detachable numeric pad. Modifying Boxee to support controlling it using the numeric pad is rather easy:

Browse to the map that contains the Boxee installation. For me that’s /opt/boxee but it’s probably different on your system (try /usr/share/boxee or /usr/lib/boxee). Open up the file system/keymaps/keyboard.xml in your favorite editor. Here you will see a big list of keybindings. Find the <global> section which contains the <keyboard> section. In that section, add the following:

      <one>SkipPrevious</one>
      <three>SkipNext</three>
      <four>Left</four>
      <five>Down</five>
      <six>Right</six>
      <seven>BigStepBack</seven>
      <eight>Up</eight>
      <nine>BigStepForward</nine>
      <period>Pause</period>

Now comment out the following lines:

      <!--
      <zero>Number0</zero>
      <one>Number1</one>
      <two>Number2</two>
      <three>Number3</three>
      <four>Number4</four>
      <five>Number5</five>
      <six>Number6</six>
      <seven>Number7</seven>
      <eight>Number8</eight>
      <nine>Number9</nine>
      -->

You may also want to modify the <FullscreenVideo> section and add these:

      <four>StepBack</four>
      <six>StepForward</six>

Save the file, exit, and start Boxee. You can now control using your numeric pad.