As you know, I got an EyeTV Hybrid, and I’m very happy with it. One of the nice things about the device is that you can control it with your Apple remote, if you attach it to a Mac that includes one. Unfortunately, I’m using the EyeTV with the PowerMac in my basement, which does not.
So the obvious next question is, how could I remote control the EyeTV. (Because you know, it’s not a real TV until it has a remote control. :-))
First off, the EyeTV appears to have an IR receiver built into it, so I tried a couple of the universal remotes I had around the house, but didn’t get any reaction.
I then considered just buying a remote. The Elgato site identifies several commercial Mac remotes that will work with the EyeTV, but even I could figure out that buying one doesn’t make sense: it’s not like I’m actually going to use it, I just want to be able to claim that I could.
Then it came to me: Salling Clicker!
Salling Clicker is a software package that allows you to remote control almost anything on your Mac (or PC) using a bluetooth cell phone or PDA. I’ve been running it on my laptop for quite a while. It’s a convenient way to make sure that I always have a presentation remote with me, since I know I’ll be carrying my cell phone.
There was only one problem: The G5 doesn’t have a bluetooth interface either.
Now, I still had a D-Link USB bluetooth transceiver from back in the days when I used to use my PC for something other than game playing. I remembered from the last time I plugged it into the PC that it needed a very specific driver to work, so I went to the D-Link site, only to find out that there was no Mac driver. Hm… Oh well, I plugged it in anyway and, as I should have guessed, the Mac recognized it immediately.
The rest of the story is short: installed Salling Clicker, paired my phone with the Mac, discovered that Clicker already knew how to control the EyeTV (woot!), and happily spent the rest of the night clicking through the channels.