Group 6. Media Player Remote

• JIFENG XING

Media Player Remote

The aim of this application is working a remote which is used to control the Totem Movie Player running on a PC. So people can use his mobile device (tested on Nokia N810 Internet Tablet) to remotely operate the media player. The communication is established on Bluetooth.

Case 1: Alice is preparing dinner in the kitchen. She wants to listen her favourite songs during the cooking. With this Media Player Remote, she is able to open the media player in her laptop without leaving the kitchen.

Case 2: Tommi is watching movie from his PC. Suddenly he feels this movie is boring and wants to change to another one. But the thing is that he doesn't want to stand up from his comfortable sofa. So he can use our remote to play a new movie without move step.

The client and server are communicated through Bluetooth connection.

The standard procedural is:

1. Server opens a rfcomm socket, starts a service named “music controller”, and waits connection request from client
2. client searches the server using service discover protocol, then connects to the server.
3. once the connection is established, user can use the client to control media player on the PC.

The programming language used is Python. The platform of server is a Laptop running Ubuntu 9.04. The client is running on a Nokia N810 Internet Tablet.

Current version is v0.4, which has the following features:

• Allow user to run or shut-down the media player
• Allow user to perform basic control function, such as change to next song and movie, pause, and previous song
• User can also control the volume of the player
• Allow user to modify the playlist in real time (in current version, user can only enqueue an exist playlist to the media player, or use an exist playlist to replace the one currently played in the software.
• Potentially support all media player which can be controlled from command line. (control commands need to be changed associated with the player)
• Theoretically, this is a cross-platform application. The server part should be run well on both Windows based PC and Linux based machine. Since the UI of the client is using Maemo Gtk, it now only works on Maemo based device. But it cant be very difficult to create a modified version for other OS based device.

note: this application works fine with Totem Media Player. It has also been test with rhythmbox, which is also works.

Unsolved problem and future work

Problems:

• Low speed service discovery during the initializing

• Ugly user interface (lack experience in Maemo Gtk)

• Minor error after the client shut-down the Bluetooth connection. But this error do not affect functions of our application

Future work:

• Better UI

• Search media files from the database in PC, and add them to current playlist. The stand alone function is already implemented, but isn't added to the application.

• Acquire contents of the current playlist (if the media player support)