Ready-made solution to map remote control to desktop streaming sites?

[gomipile]

Is there a good solution for making streaming sites on a home theater PC as easy to control with a remote control as the apps on a Fire TV are with its remote?

Several apps on my Fire TV can't handle my ISP's inconsistent, bursty bandwidth problems. The desktop sites for those streaming services work fine on the same connection.

However, the price I pay for using a HTPC is having to fumble around with a pointing device to control each site. I'd really like a setup where I have a remote as simple as my Fire stick remote with software that just works to map the controls to each desktop streaming site in a fullscreened browser.

I'm really sick of using a trackpad for this, and a mouse wouldn't be much better, and also just wouldn't work the way this room is set up.


Anyone got any good suggestions?

[Batcathat]

This is completely untested (and I had the idea literally seconds ago), but maybe connecting something like an Xbox controller to your computer would work? Though I have no idea how well that works with a browser.

[factotum]

Does your HTPC pointing device include a keyboard? Because if it does, certainly in Firefox you can assign shortcut keywords to bookmarks and use them to directly go to them by typing the shortcuts in the address bar--use really short keywords and that might be simpler than messing with the trackpad.

[gomipile]

The big problem is that the desktop websites of different streaming services have different keyboard commands for functions I'd want at a button press. For a solution to be worthwhile, it would have to address that.

[Algeh]

Maybe a custom keypad, if it's all stuff that can be done with a partial keyboard and some macros?

This Amazon search seems vaguely promising: https://www.amazon.com/s?k=programmable+mechanical+keypad&pd_rd_r=2715a39b-86e4-44ca-b1fc-04da081a7809&pd_rd_w=5zI4Y&pd_rd_wg=wgVjV&pf_rd_p=e8ca5ddd-1b5c-474f-a8a8-a06c73574a1c&pf_rd_r=H69DK5GY64GFRVEPQZF4&ref=pd_sn_dp_d_rs_search_3 , although I've never actually bought one. (I've been tempted a few times, but so far I don't have a use case where "programming the new toy to do stuff" wouldn't end up outweighing "actually using the new toy to do stuff". One of these days I'll probably end up buying one anyway.)

[gomipile]

Maybe a custom keypad, if it's all stuff that can be done with a partial keyboard and some macros?

This Amazon search seems vaguely promising: https://www.amazon.com/s?k=programmable+mechanical+keypad&pd_rd_r=2715a39b-86e4-44ca-b1fc-04da081a7809&pd_rd_w=5zI4Y&pd_rd_wg=wgVjV&pf_rd_p=e8ca5ddd-1b5c-474f-a8a8-a06c73574a1c&pf_rd_r=H69DK5GY64GFRVEPQZF4&ref=pd_sn_dp_d_rs_search_3 , although I've never actually bought one. (I've been tempted a few times, but so far I don't have a use case where "programming the new toy to do stuff" wouldn't end up outweighing "actually using the new toy to do stuff". One of these days I'll probably end up buying one anyway.)
Sure, if the bulk of my question is ignored.

[Excession]

The big problem is that the desktop websites of different streaming services have different keyboard commands for functions I'd want at a button press. For a solution to be worthwhile, it would have to address that.

I think AutoHotKey would be able to solve this. With the right script you could remap your chosen keys to whatever the web site uses, switching based on the web browser window title to use the matching remapping. Writing that script for it will be very hard though.