Divide and Conquer

· Software Development

Remote control of XBMC, but not too much

Yesterday and today I have scripted a small web interface for remote control of XBMC using its HTTP API. (BTW, That API could really use a redesign!)

It’s actually just a page showing a screen shot and the name of the file that is currently playing, together with some commands to remote control XBMC.

Available commands are pause/resume, stop, play another file, and shutdown.

I also implemented support for showing notifications on the XBMC screen, which gave me an idea:

The Google Calendar can e-mail reminders for appointments. If XBMC is running, the reminder could be shown as a notification on the XBMC monitor.

I was just about to start implementing this calendar-reminder-in-XBMC when I reminded myself that there are many other small and big projects that would be more valuable for me. But instead of throwing this idea right down the trashcan I decided to blog about it first. Done!

Now I’ll spend some valuable time with my son!

Tags: Ubuntu XBMC

2 comments

Comments are archived from the original blog and closed.

  1. David ·

    Hi there,

    Would you make this public? I would be interested in something like this.

    Thanks.

    Dave

  2. David · · reply to David

    You can actually pull it from https://github.com/twogood/xbmcweb – but beware that it assumes that it can resolve “xbox” in DNS. The most interesting file is probably application/services/Xbmc.php.