[mythtv-users] Controlling myth from the deck

[Steve Peters - Priority Electronics]

>I have some speakers and wifi on the deck.  During the summer, I run
>mythmusic on a frontend in the house, and pipe the music outside.
>
>Controlling it is a challenge though.  Last summer I used a 
>laptop, which
>sucked.  You can't see a laptop screen in bright sunlight and 
>running into
>the house to change the volume or skip a track sucks.
>
>Sunlight visible LCDs are way too expensive and completely 
>unrealistic for
>this, so I'm looking for something really basic; an old 
>reflective laptop
>would be ideal if I could figure out a way to hook wifi up to it....




You could use a wifi connected phone and vnc into your mythbox and use your
keypad on your phone to control stuff (ie. Press "p" to pause playback, and
so on.

Here's what I use for my windows mobile phone:
http://www.realvnc.com/products/beta/ce/

Otherwise, you could try to setup a web based vnc program on your server and
access it through a web browser on your phone.

If you don't have a wifi phone, you could get any windows pda like a dell
axim or an hp ipaq, or the nokia 770 or n800 series pda's too. The nokia 770
can be had for cheap on ebay (and has a nice sized screen).

It's probably not the ideal solution, but this way, you can do everything
you can do with your remote or keyboard on your mythbox.

The last option is to get one of the many network based remote controls that
use telnet, but I find they are not as good as the vnc option.

-Steve