Personally I prefer a BT-Remote. As with IR the receiver and sender needs to see each other.
Added support for exellent bluetooth remote G20BTS PRO (available on Aliexpress) to my RPI4 based Volumio. Now both playing commands and gyro mouse on screen with touchscreen plugin work perfectly
Here are steps
Enter your RPI4 via ssh and pair your remote with bluetoothctl (comes with Volumio)
Copy file g20.py (below) to /home/volumio and give execution permission: chmod +x g20.py
Under sudo create file /lib/systemd/system/g20.service (below)
sudo systemctl enable g20
sudo systemctl start g…
After I added to my Volumio box a support of bluetooth airmouse (Added support of bluetooth remote G20BTS PRO to my Volumio on RPI4 - #4 by Wheaten ) I developed much more sophisticated script. See:
Main features:
It is universal, must work for all such devices without any code changes. IR based remotes can work via Flirc USB dongle (https://flirc.tv )
Multiple connected HID devices are supported, each of them will work
Hot plug/unplug of USB devices is supported, after hot plug new device wi…
However using the IR -remote plugin is easier to implement (see link shared by @SimonE ), as the BT requires more programming.