[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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