[Posted to http://wiki.kandalaya.org/cgi-bin/twiki/view/Main/AnyRemote]
* Why What do you do if you (a) use your computer a lot for watching movies and playing music, like I do, and (b) you are a lazy SOB who can't be bothered to get up from the sofa to change the volume or skip a track, like I am? You get yourself a remote control for the computer. * History Many years ago I had bought a TV tuner card for the computer, which came with a free remote control. Those were the days when computers used to come with serial ports (remember ttyS0, stty and AT commands? Nah, you kids wouldn't know any of this stuff!) Anyhow, my trusty neighbourhood hardware vendor aka Amit Kalra (he's paying me Rs 5000 to promote his name) had no problems finding me an IR dongle that would connect to the serial port and was Linux compatible; two weeks of banging my head on LIRC, mailing lists and suchlike and voila! I could fast-forward songs in Hindi movies and replay the steamy tracks in English ones again and again, all with just a push of a button entailing minimal change to my vegetative state. Heady days! Then the computer changed, the IR dongle blew up and the remote stopped working, and for many years I had to make a choice between getting up to fast forward, bearing the excruciating pains in knee joints, and watching Rajesh Khanna (remember him?) rolling his eyebrows when a song came up. Then the pain became so bad (and Rajesh Khanna's eyebrow- rolling so intolerable) that I had no choice but to find a non-IR remote control for the computer at any cost. Back to Google, which threw up... * AnyRemote! At first I was a bit suspicious of their claims. I mean, doesn't a remote control software that claims to work through bluetooth, infra- red, WiFi, IP, cable and web sound like a terminal case of creeping featuritis? What turned the scales was the availability of a Debian package in the mainstream repositories -- if Debian has packaged it, IMO, it's at least worth checking out. So a couple of aptitude installs and I was ready to go. Stick in the BT dongle and fire up AnyRemote, and it presents you with a long list of applications that it can control. Now to get the pointer device setup... Since my phone supports both BT and Java midlets, all I needed was the AnyRemote Java client. A bit of going back and forth between the various icon sizes, and the midlet was installed, and started up OK. Now for the acid test... fire up amarok, stick in some 70s rock tracks and load up AnyRemote on the phone. OK, it detects my computer's BT out of the box. Press "Connect", and... oh suck! no amarok-specific buttons come up! WTF? Open the kanyremote GUI window on the computer and it lists available applications, including amarok. OK, let's try double-clicking on amarok and restarting the agent on the phone, and it works! I can control amarok through the phone, what joy! Similar test on mplayer, and that works too. * Functionality Now that the fundamental functionality was done, I could fool around with other features. The ready-made mplayer functionality lets you remotely fast-forward, rewind, change volume, pause, mute, switch between window and full-screen modes, quit and load a new file. All well and good, and I use it mostly just for volume changes and pausing and restarting anyway. The amarok functionality is another kettle of fish altogether. It can do everything (well, everything relevant) that the mplayer icon set does. Apart from that it lets you switch songs (next, previous) in the playlist. The killer-app amarok features, which blew what passes for my mind, however are: - Load up and select from playlist. Yup, press one of the icons and AnyRemote shows you your current playlist on the phone itself, and lets you scroll around in that and select which track you want to play. Cool, huh? But wait, there's more... - Press another button and it brings up all the context for the current track on your phone. That's right, you can see information related to the track, the Wikipedia page for the artist (and the track, if there's one) and even the lyrics for the currently playing track. OK, creeping featuritis or no creeping featuritis, this is to die for! Apart from amarok and mplayer, AnyRemote has built-in support for about 20 other packages that I could find (I can already see how making presentations would be much easier using the phone to control slide transitions). Adding support for new packages entails writing a script in some arcane and completely ungrokkable scripting language that AnyRemote uses for doing its magic, but should be comparatively easy if you use an existing script as a base. * Conclusion In summary, AnyRemote is an excellent tool for remote controlling apps on your computer through your bluetooth- and Midlet-enables mobile phone (and presumably other means too, which I haven't bothered to check.) It's fairly easy to setup and use, and has awesome features beyond those a traditional remote offers. It's extremely versatile, letting you control anything from a music player to your whole desktop (you can use your phone instead of the mouse if you're the masochistic type.) I highly recommend it for anyone who needs remote control functionality for their computer. Regards, -- Raj -- Raj Mathur r...@kandalaya.org http://kandalaya.org/ GPG: 78D4 FC67 367F 40E2 0DD5 0FEF C968 D0EF CC68 D17F PsyTrance & Chill: http://schizoid.in/ || It is the mind that moves _______________________________________________ Ilugd mailing list Ilugd@lists.linux-delhi.org http://frodo.hserus.net/mailman/listinfo/ilugd
