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Group 6. Media Player Remote

  • JIFENG XING
  • GOBINDA KANDEL

Idea

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.

Result

Since my partner GOBINDA KANDEL lacks knowledge of Python and C++, I have to do everything by myself.

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.

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)