How to remap special keys on Asus laptop?

From the The ASUS Info Booth topic (at Notebook Review forum), I found a link called Customize ASUS hotkeys. That link sent me to Asus notebook keys, v1.3 topic on that forum:

Asus notebook keys, v1.3

This program gives you ability to define own actions for additional buttons of Asus notebooks.

That's all I needed! What's more: the source-code is included! (too bad I don't have Visual Studio).

However, the program from the first post has a silly GUI mistake, which was later fixed by another user and then released as AsusNbKeysCtr-1.3fix.zip (but without source-code).

Using that program (the fixed version), I was able to remap the extra laptop keys to Volume Up, Volume Down and Volume Mute keystrokes, which are directly recognized by Windows. That's great, and solves half of my problem!

The other half, however, involves changing the monitor brightness. Unfortunately, there is no easy solution for that, and I need a command-line program to increase and decrease the brightness.

I've found two command-line applications that allow me to set the brightness to some value, but they do not allow me to increase or decrease it. The first one is Brightener, written by Ciaran user. The second one is Display Brightness Vista Gadget from edgylogic.com. Since they don't solve my issue, I still need a program to change the brightness.

Probably a little bit late to answer, but after following link after link I found a version of DMedia that replaces the normal one and dispatches general keyboard key events for media playback. I know the question was about other buttons, but the fact that the media keys launched a random app each time (and that in Windows 8 it brings WMP to the foreground) bothered me.

The app can be found in binary form here (there's a source in bitbucket should you see it) http://3mptylab.blogspot.it/2012/09/how-to-make-asus-notebooks-media-keys.html

Just download the rar file, stop the DMedia.exe process, go to your ATK Media installation folder, rename the original DMedia.exe just in case and then put the downloaded DMedia.exe in the same folder. Execute it to make it work (and normally it should launch at boot).

It's based on this code, which worked only for one app. http://zaak404.wordpress.com/2011/05/09/controlling-foobar2000-with-asus-g73-media-keys/

Working great on my Asus U30Jc under Windows 8 64-bit, whereas all other methods failed to work properly.

Saw your comment on another answer I left for setting brightness so I modded the app I wrote for that question a bit and came up with a tray app which you can use to control brightness (same restrictions apply as per the comments in the other thread).

This version of the app is pretty poor at the moment. Some seriously bad code at the moment but it seems to work for me anyway. Currently the hotkey is hardcoded as CTRL + ALT + UP / DOWN but as you'll see there's a dialog available to set up the hotkeys yourself. Doesn't work at the moment but I'll get around to fixing it at some point.

Download

When I do get around to fixing the settings, I'll clean the code up a little and post it here too.