New Plugin: Pocket PC Remote for MP

[r_a_s_robin]

Is the current version working with Mediaportal RC1 and windows mobile 6.0/6.1?

I will be buying a HTC phone soon, and i'd love to control my HTPC with it. A good bluetooth/wifi remote control function for PDA's would be/is a killer plugin for MP. Too bad the initial programmers don't seem to be active anymore. (Correct me if i'm wrong!)

I'm wondering if anyone is still working on a bugfree remote control for Mediaportal 1.0. Please let me and other users know!

Summery of Remote Control projects for PDA's:
MPblue
Pocket PC Remote Control
New Pocket PC Remote Control (this topic)

I also found a remote control on the web that is made for windows MCE. It looks really cool and it's got alle the features i would love to have for controlling MP. Maybe it's an inspiration for developers:
Rudeo Control

[SinnerG]

Hey all,

I'm currently working on a remote control for media portal, and I'm using an iPAQ 214 as 'target' development platform.

I already got a working (needs clean up) tcp server/client system but I'm troubled about the following:

Is there a way to 'extract' what song is playing and stuff like that?

Friendly Greetings,
- SinnerG

[ChuckTX]

I am interested in helping with a project like this. Is this the only project like this in active development?

Chuck

[darick_c]

I've written a server, a windows client, and a pocket pc client.

The clients can be used as remotes to control Medai Portal on the server. They also display the current file being played with a progress bar and the current playlist. It also retrieves music files by share, album, artist, or genre as well as playlists. You can't manage playlists yet, but shouldn't be to difficult to add in. I plan on creating a plugin page and thread, but thought I would put it out for anyone to play with.

To install:
Copy MediaPortalInformationServer.dll and InformationServerCommon.dll from compiled into the plugin/process folder of media portal and run the config.

.Net 3.5 needs to be installed.

Windows Client:
Just double click MediaPortalClient.exe in compiled.
It is missing some of the playing functionality in the music tab that the pocket pc client has, but has keys mapped to control media portal, such as the arrow keys, enter, esc. etc. I want to add in where you can choose what keys map to certain controls.

Pocket PC:
I don't have an installer cab yet, so just copy PPCRemoteClient.exe and run it.
I've found that sometimes using the server name doesn't work and needs the ip instead.
It is compiled fro windows mobile 5.

The direction button can be used to control MP.

It works great on my HTC p4300 smartphone.

I'll try to polish it up a little more and get a plugin thread started.

Darick


UPDATE: Updated code can be download here:
New Plugin: Pocket PC Remote for MP

[ChuckTX]

So what version of "Pocket PC" are you running?
So where are you trying to go with this? I was hoping to work on one that is web based so that the skinning / customization for others would be easy. Many different skins / screen resolutions will be needed because the devices are so different.

Thanks, Chuck

[darick_c]

I have a HTC p4300 smart phone running windows mobile 6.

I wanted to be able to play my music on my HTPC without having to turn on the monitor, or my case the projector. So, since the other projects seemed to have fizzled out I took on the challenge (I also created a plugin that dims turns off my lights when I start a movie and turns them on while paused or stopped playing using x10). I used sockets because I wanted two way communication and because it is so flexible. I even wanted to write a silverlight application that can connect using sockets for web based control. I think silverlight would be great for creating an online epg as well.

I would love to be able to create a nice gui (like pointui home), but I don't have much experience in developing for pocket pc's. I have seen others asking for desktop client remotes as well though. WPF would be a good way to go with that, then skins would be very easy to make.

I think it would be more difficult to give good feedback to the user if it were web based, but I see what you are saying as far as skins go. If that would suit your needs better, then I say go for it. Feel free to use/reference my code. It isn't very well commented (if at all) right now though.

I really like Media Portal and love that it is easy to write plugins like this for it. Though an api would be nice. It takes a while to dig around and try to figure out how to do things.

Darick

[ChuckTX]

I've got HTC Touch on WM6. I tried your plug in, but I can't get it to work. I installed it and changed the port just to make sure it didn't give me an error & that it held the change. That worked. The clients though I can't get to work. The Windows client keeps crashing "unhandled exception any time I do anything other than change the tab that it's on. It even crashes as I try to type in the new port number by number. I'm assuming the Mobile client is also crashing. I can change the port, but when I click connect it crashes too.

Thanks, Chuck

Back to general stuff. When I say web based I don't mean HTML. It needs to be able to send and receive information without having to refresh the entire window. What I meant about customization was that I would like to come up something that then could be edited & have the buttons and stuff moved around without messing up the functionality. I don't know what the options are. I would like to work on something that would also support the Iphone. Silverlight is on WM & Nokia, but not the Iphone or IPod Touch. Then there wouldn't need to be a separate client for the desktop either. Anyways just my thoughts. I'll see if I can get this one up and going first.

Thanks, Chuck

[darick_c]

Do you have .net 3.5 installed on your system? It can be made to work with 2.0, but I do use some of the 3.5 stuff.

Darick

[ChuckTX]

Yeah I checked. I've got 3.5, I even did a repair on it just to be sure. I was thinking it might be something with the server though because they were both crashing. I didn't know if they both tried actually connecting right when they tried to do the first thing. Can you check and see what happens if they can't connect. I didn't know if it was that there was a connection error that just wasn't getting handled. So what were you building this in? I tried opening the client in Visual C# 2008 Express & I was getting an error. Also what OS are you running?

Thanks, Chuck

[darick_c]

Both clients should bring up a dialog saying they couldn't connect. If you click a button besides connect while not connected then it will throw an error (like I said, it isn't polished up yet). I am using Vista and VS 2008 Pro as my dev machine. I think I'll either download the express version or use VS 2005 at home on XP. I've tried it on my other computer running xp mce but not since I made some changes. If you can get it working, cool, if not, then I'll try to get it polished up a little more and start another thread for it. It'll be a few days though.

Darick