[mythtv-users] Controlling Mythtv from a PDA
Peter Diffey
pedro at heroic.co.uk
Sun Feb 26 00:33:51 UTC 2006
Hi,
I installed Mythtv a few weeks ago, and whilst beguiled by the
record/playback features, I found keyboard control to be pretty ho-hum.
I fiddled around with IR remotes, and came to the conclusion that there
are just too many keys to fit into an off-the-shelf remote, and once you
have done it you forget which keys are mapped to what.
and then
Out came 0.19 and reading the release notes I see there is a frontend
socket interface - at last I can fix my remote control problem.
I use a Palm Tungsten, without it I would be lost, as soon as I got it I
started playing around getting TCP-IP over Bluetooth to work. It can be
a bitch, but once done it means I have WWW access from under the covers
in bed and and. So I wanted to get it to talk to MythTV, and thanks to
the socket interface in 0.19 it is dead easy. All you need to do is
build some web pages that can talk to sockets and you have a web based
user interface that can display on Palms or any other PDA, and it will
even work with a lot of mobile phones, if you have GPRS etc you could
even change channel via the public telephone network - that's a special
feature to annoy the wife ;-))
The web browser will allow you to
* change channel by selecting the channel by name
* change channel from a "whats on now" list
* select and play a recorded program
* change the volume, and fast forward/back
* navigate around ion-screen menus
I have put the files in a tar ball -
www.heroic.co.uk/mythweb/mythcontrol.tar.gz, all you need to do is
extract the web pages to your Apache MythWeb server, go to
http://yourwebserver/mythcontrol/index.php and you will be asked to put
in your server details.
Then get Bluetooth working ( thats the hard bit - allow 4 hours of poke
and hope) and bingo remote control from up to 100m.
I have included controls for the features that I find I want on a daily
basis, If you feel there are other features that are missing, you will
find them very easy to add, it's just a case of editing a couple of text
files written in PHP.
For the techies - the pages are written in Noddy PHP - the largest file
is only 89 lines. I developed it on an old PHP4 version running on a Sun
box, which did not have direct socket support, so I talk to mythtv via a
little perl script, over the next day or so I will fix the script to use
sockets directly.
Pete Diffey
St Albans, UK
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