(For the record, I don’t like those $company_name buttons either. But, we must learn to suffer whatever we cannot avoid.)

These bluetooth media remotes connect perfectly fine to a Linux machine today and even report themselves as input devices. However, as of this writing (September 19, 2026), the Linux kernel doesn’t receive any input events from these remotes.

This is my effort to fix that and help keep perfectly functional remotes like these from becoming e-waste.

Chromecast Remote (0x18d1:0x9450)#

This is a pretty simple fix. The Chromecast remote sends a report count of 2 in its media descriptor, when in fact there’s only 1. The following kernel module is an easy fix, effectively a quirk to patch the descriptor:

I’ve reported this to the Linux kernel’s linux-input mailing list (I’m not interested in jumping through hoops to submit such a simple patch), so hopefully it gets integrated some day.

Playstation 5 Media Remote (0x054c:0x0d5a)#

This one was a lot more complicated. It relies on an “enable buttons” command being sent from the host before the remote starts sending input events. I relied heavily on Nielk1’s research to create the following kernel module:

Since this is a far more complicated module, I haven’t submitted it to the kernel devs. Hopefully someone can take this kernel module and carry the torch from there.