Remote control interface plans

[maniac's]

Hi devs !

I saw that MediaPortal supports USBUIRT based remote control. From the sources I saw, this functionnality does not seems to use a remote control plugin dedicated interface.

Personnaly I would like to develop a MediaPortal plugin to handle the ASUS DiGiMatrix remote control (I have already developped the driver).

Do you plan to extend mediaportal to use other remote control technologies? Or are you fixed on the current support ?

Thanks (for the response, and for your work)

[Mr.Mitchell]

There is also someone workin on WinLirc remote control support. He dropped by ion IRC yesterday. And I think that I saw that a IR plugin interface was planned for after .1

But when you come by on IRC you can discuss with Frodo or you could make a proposal for such an interface.

I Think there's a lot of users (and me :wink: ) who uses X10 based remote.
The most useful thing is that those remotes work with X10 based radio frequency (RF) and then work even through walls.
Most of those remotes can send,receive and learn Infrared codes.

-> Example from Marmitek http://www.intellihome.be/english/pr...iew.asp?id=279

... with those remotes, you can control all your hi-fi all your htpc and all your house !!!

- ATI Remote Wonder 1 and 2 http://remotew.free.fr/product.htm

- Firefly PC Remote (snapstream remote) http://www.snapstream.com/images/pro...oxContents.jpg
http://www.snapstream.com/products/f...ge_Gallery.asp

- nVIDIA Personal Cinema remote control http://www.nvidia.com/object/feature_PC_remote.html

- X10 RF PC Remote http://htpcnews.com/main.php?id=thr_remote_2

- remotes from Marmitek, Q-Sonic, and ONEbox / Niveus PC Remote.

Girder support those remotes but a built-in support in MP like USBUIRT will be appreciated by a lot of peoples. For now I'm using Girder and satified.

Thanks,

Seb

[maniac's]

I started to developp a plugin for my DiGiMatrix remote contol. I found that there was no solution to use the Action object because of the inexistence of an interface (USBIRT is directly included in the mediaportal exe right ?).

It could be done as jadz did it in its winlirc plugin but I do not like it very much because we loose a lot of capabilities (just letters are accepted).

To solve this problem, I think it is important to consider "input" plugins ( those without screen and which are used to control mediaportal) differently from others plugins because they have to interract with the entire application.
If the application supplies publicly an event (ex. ActionRequested), each input plugin could send an ActionType and other needed parameters to the MediaPortal core.

Please discuss !

[Mr.Mitchell]

There are some ideas about this in the Docs/architecture.txt file, below is a short extract of it. Read the whole file for more info.

-- Cut'n'paste --
Plugin Types:
There should probably be different types of plugins.

IInputPlugin
The main feature of the input plugin is to translate something/anything into MediaPortal actions.
This to control the behaviour of MediaPortal with remotes etc.
-- Cut'n'paste --

[maniac's]

Thanks Mr.Mitchell, very interesting things in this file !