A media player upgrade

Wednesday, June 24th, 2026 at 08:16pm

It has now been five years since I switched over to Kodi on a Raspberry Pi as the media player for my television. It has been working well, except that it was struggling with the newer codecs and higher resolutions, but it wasn’t enough of a bother to consider replacing it.

A few months ago via a former colleage I ended up with a Pi 5 that otherwise was destined for e-waste, so I stuck my head back into the pi/media player space to find that Kodi has continued on with a few new versions, as has the LibreELEC distribution to make running it easy.

However the RemotePi would not be able to be transferred over (the one I had for the Pi 3 couldn’t handle the power needs of a Pi 4) and that company has shut down and vanished off the internet so I needed to find a replacement for IR and power management. I had never really looked at case options, so I was pleasantly surprised to find there was wide variety of cases, including some that provided an IR receiver, power management and also upsizing and relocating the HDMI ports.

I quickly settled on the Argon ONE V3 Case (not the version with NVME support) and the matching remote (even though the plan is to keep using my Harmony 650), these were delivered today.

Argon ONE V3 Case for Raspberry Pi 5 Raspberry Pi 5 and the HDMI/Power board from an rgon ONE V3 Case

It was a little bit fiddly but otherwise straightforward to get it all assembled. I loaded the latest LibreELEC onto a spare SD card (not the fastest boot option, but is all I need) and after installing a couple of add-ons I was able to control it via the Argon remote.

When looking into my options earlier I had found that someone had forked the Argon add-on to make updates and also make it available from the Kodi repository, so I didn’t even need to manually install that plugin, just find it in the list.

I could have stopped there but I now needed to get it working again with my Harmony remote. I don’t fully understand all the config but the I think the key items are:

  • in the config.txt file the dtoverlay=gpio-ir,gpio_pin=23 line (added by the argon plugin) will enable the IR kernel module on pin 23
  • this in conjunction with the mappings I found in a config file were what enabled the IR receiver and setup the buttons on the Argon remote
  • the config.txt entry from my previous Pi was dtoverlay=gpio-ir,rc-map-name=rc-rc6-mce which loads the IR module (using default pin) and then maps an RC6 Media Center remote

Having Argon buttons in a config file and then MCE buttons from a keymapping felt like they would co-exist, so I tried:

dtoverlay=gpio-ir,gpio_pin=23,rc-map-name=rc-rc6-mce

I don’t know if this is the “proper” way to do things, but it worked! I could now control Kodi from either the Argon remote or my Harmony remote with its MCE programming.

I reprogrammed my Harmony remote (I’m so glad that software still works) with the Argon power button code, so that is also fully functional.

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