[PLUG] VLC remote control

Erik Lane eriklane at gmail.com
Wed Jan 6 23:16:11 UTC 2010


Just for fun I was trying to remotely control my computer that acts as our
movie player. I wanted to just tell it to switch from one movie to another,
which I thought would be a fairly simple task. I failed pretty miserably.

I know that it is possible, because when I was searching I kept coming
across various apps for both the blackberry and iphone to do what I wanted.
But I was logged in with ssh from my laptop and wanted to do it that way.
(And I don't have either of those things, and not about to go get one...) I
tried everything that google could find for me, with all kinds of different
command line options, specifying which interface to use, using rc, ncurses,
and on and on. Every time it just tried to send the video to my laptop. But
since VLC wasn't running on there it would take over the terminal screen and
try to render the video in ascii. (I was actually impressed with how well it
did, but that's another matter.) I also tried using the http vlc server to
get it going, but no luck there, either. I made these attempts with vlc
already running on the server as well as with it shut down. (Though server
is a bit of a misnomer, since the screen is also attached to it, and that's
where I want the video/audio stream displayed.)

So my question is does anyone know of a way to do that? It's just a
curiosity and gee-whiz thing, so don't worry about looking into it yourself
if you don't already know how to do it. It's not worth much effort, but I am
still curious about it...

Thanks!
Erik

This is on a fairly fresh install of ubuntu 9.10, with very little extra on
it. Just VLC, TVtime, maybe a couple others.



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