IR Remote Controller Volume Keys and XBMC

About half year ago I bought very cheap ($8.40) but still very good USB IR Media Remote Controller from dealextreme.com. I've successfully used it to control Windows Media Player and my (now old) favorite - GOM player. These players worked good but Windows Media Player was too limited and GOM player user interface was too close to standard PC program.. Finally few days ago I found very nice, free and open source media player - XBMC that converts your PC and TV to true home media center. With remote controller the XBMC makes you feel you communicate just with very advanced TV media center and lets you completely forget about PC keyboard and mouse..

The only problem was that volume keys on my remote wasn't worked on XBMC. After some investigation I found that this remote sends these keys as Windows media keys and as they always controls Windows system main volume the XBMC developers decided not to use them to control XBMC player volume by default  :-(

After some googling and debugging I finally found solution and it was quite simple;

The current stable XBMC version - 10.1 "Dharma" is quite old (March 10th, 2011) and doesn't support these keys at all. So we need to use one of latest nightly builds of upcoming version 11, which I found is stable enough. I've used: XBMCSetup-20110727-30a9070-master.exe

To enable Windows media volume keys you need to modify relevant lines in file "C:\Program Files (x86)\XBMC\system\keymaps\appcommand.xml" :
...
<volume_mute>Mute<volume_mute/>
<volume_down>VolumeDown</volume_down>
<volume_up>VolumeUp</volume_up>
...

then you need to create file advancedsettings.xml in folder (on Windows 7) "C:\Users\<User>\AppData\Roaming\XBMC\userdata" as below:

<advancedsettings>
<enablemultimediakeys>true</enablemultimediakeys>
</advancedsettings>

That's all. Volume keys on your "TV" remote should work now.
Enjoy!