Windows Mobile Sideshow remote control (1 Viewer)

[jonkol]

Been lurking in this forum for year, but never posted. Dont really know why. Time to change!

Anyway: I love Mediaportal and the only thing missing is the ability to use a PPC or Smartphone as a remote control (I have got one of my HTPCs in one room with the main speakers in another room, the living room). Its a big fuzz running out of the room just to change song or lower the volume...

I know there are a lot of threads about this subject. No really good solution exists as far as I know.

Two thoughts:

Why dosnt VNC or remote desktop work? I remote control most of my computers with VNC from Windows Mobile, but the Mediaportal interface just dosnt show up. Is there any VNC server that I can get to show the GUI? Dosnt even work with the client on a standard PC...

Secondly and maybe most important: Sideshow is comming to Windows Mobile. It should be fairly easy to build a widget for doing some basic things? Or is widget communication one-way???

Thanks

/Jonas

 

[gemx]

Hmm, never really tried that.
An rdp session doesn't work as it does not work with directx.
There are some posts about using UltraVNC which worked but i never tried it.

 

[jonkol]

I did try UltraVNC and did not suceed... The post I find about people using UltraVNC seems to be to configure Mediaportal rather than seeing the UI. But I may be wrong. Have to play around some more with settings maybe....

/Jonas

 

[pStar]

hi
recently i tried vnc with mediaportal (v0.2.3final) and it worked almost perfectly. on the serverside (htpc) i'm running the latest ultravnc (1.04 or something). as client i'm using a nokia n800 with a maemo-port of vnc...i even get fullscreen video, it is very choppy (i guess 1-2 frames per second), but it is enough to get an idea whats on at the moment.
the only things which could be better is serverside-scaling. ultra vnc only supports full, half, third, quarter resolutions and this leaves a black border or even worse scrollbars around my n800 vnc viewer. speaking of which: the n800 vnc viewer could need some improvements too (autostart, key-assignments)...i hope there will be a new version out soon....
regards

ps: i left almost all settings on default: in mediaportal & ultravnc...so perhaps you could give it another try

 

[jonkol]

Hmmm

Tried more or less the same setup yeasterday, except my client was on a PC so I did have UltraVNC in both ends....
Maybe I should go directly to the PPC client, that might work better ?

Thanks for you input, now I have something to do tonight .

/Jonas

 

[jonkol]

Made some progress. Installed the beta of UltraVNC (was on the stable release before) and now it updates the window under the mouse, so I can "paint" mediaportal with the mouse to see the screen, not very usefull, but better than before....

Did you have any special settings for getting the full screen to refresh. I think I tried them all however....

/Jonas

 

[pStar]

hi there,
i don't really have any clue what's different on my setup...so i just throw in some guesses: did you install the ultravnc mirror video driver? what graphics card do you use, do have the newest drivers installed? are you running the ultravnc-server as application or system service?
regards

 

[jonkol]

Yes, Im running UltraVNC as a service, I have the latest drivers and im using the mirror video driver...
The card is a Nvidia 6200. Must be some compatability problem between the card and the mirror driver :-(

Thanks for your help anyway!

I started trying out Salling clicker instead (for now). A quite good solution for controling the music from another room at least...

/Jonas

 

[mr_minning]

Hi Jonas,
I use TightVNC and it works great.
I too am very interested in using my Windows Mobile as a remote control. Do you have to have Vista for this to work?

BR,

 

[jonkol]

I tried tight-VNC, and this worked even worse than UVNC for me (both works great for remote Desktop, as long as you dont star Mediaportal...)

However as I mentioned above Salling clicker (Swedish company www.salling.com solved all problems I had with remote control of my computer. And no, you dont need to have Vista on the computer.
I now use my Windows Mobile Phone to select or search songs and artists, alter volume and more, from anywhere in my house. As I have my HTPC connected to the loudspeakers in the living room (the loudspeaker are the only type of "electronics" I want to have in my living room) I can now control everything without running into the TV room. Just what I wanted!!!
This morning I even started some christmas music in the living room from my bedroom (on another floor) without getting out of bed...

This is of course for music playback only and I use the script for Mediamonkey for this (llok in the salling forums). There is a script for Mediaportal (also in the forums) that I havnet tried out yet.

Next steps is to have a amplifier with second zone and another soundcard...
Then I can use salling clicker to control the music in my living room and someone else can use Mediaportal and do what they want in the TV room. All from the same PC .

Now I just need to think about all this can affect usage of my other HTPC in the homecinema room

Jonas