I thinking of giving this a try since for some odd reason my Green Button stopped working to launch the Media Center application. It sounds like this will definitely allow you to change buttons once an application has focus, but how do you handle swithing the focus from one app to another? Or as in my particular case, getting the Media Center program to launch when pressing the Green Button? Is this supported? If so, this and the ability to control iTunes with my remote you will have earned my $15 for sure.
as far as the blaster, yes you are correct in that it "reinterprets" the signal from the remote. I am not sure how the codes are set up, since you don't actually have to choose a model or anything, but I assume it is doing some such manipulation. There's a setup routine you folow in Media Cneter when setting them up and it somehow figures out what codes need to be sent via the blaster.
So what the person was suggesting would be quite useful and I have seen some other people discussing it before. Essentially, you would present a way to map the remote buttons via software, but instead of just controlling internal app functions, you would have a way to set the "state" of the remote to say "Set Top Box" or "Audio Reciever" or "Tivo". This would both set up the the infrared receiver to "reinterpret" the signal and direct it to the (appropriate) IR blaster.
I am not sure if you would need to have a sepearet blaster per device, or if you could broadcast one set of instructions out to many IR transmitt and the device would know based on the codes received that the signal was meant for it. So in other words, would Tivo interpret a code of say "X10" to mean stop recording, while the set top box would interpret it to be change channel. If this is the case, you would likely need some type of switch for the IR transmittrs so that the right code got sent to the right channel based on the "state" of the remote.
This is all very doable and is probably quite similar to how the logitech universal remotes work, but instead of building some type of flash memory USB download, you would keep all of this onboard the computer.
Franly, I am surprised no one has come out with a product like this yet. There is deifnitely a hurdle to gathering all the codes, but I would think once you know them, you assemble a USB IR emitter (blaster) which could have 4, or 8 or 12 or however many channels you wanted to enable pretty cheaply. I would think much cheaper than even the cheapest logitech remote goes for.
And... if you need to gather codes, perhaps you could offer a rebate for anyone who has a remote that is not yet in your database. They could send it in, you learn the new codes, add them to the db publish the db and send the remote back to the customer.
So now that I have defined your business plan and you know how to work with remote codes, all you need is an investor and a simple device fabricator. So what do you think, I can i buy one next week?