ok, just got my box from tiger and it's cooler than I thought. Of course like everyone else I really want to be able to control the unit from the web (i.e. another computer on the same network).

I'm wondering if anyone has thought of taking the remote control and virtualizing it.

I'm not in the same state as my box so I can't play with it yet but I'm guessing that it would require a change in the driver, shouldn't be hard.

Any ideas?
thx

bobm

Remote control may be possible with a program similar to Frank Van Gestel's "Displayserver". This was something that originally ran on the Empeg Car player, and Frank once got it working on the Receiver.

However, the "remote control" aspect of Displayserver may or may not have actually worked, I do not know. Please locate and join the other discussions about Displayserver and see if you can get it working on your player.

Displayserver is a really cool hack, and might be exactly what the poster's looking for. But I know that I, at least, have had a 33% failure rate with it (it works on 2 of my 3 boxes. Havne't yet been able to debug the third).

Basically, it's a kernel that's been hacked to allow read access to the display and write access to the IR device, such that another program (actually, a minimal web server kicked off by a modified init script) can receive IR commands from the network, and can send out an image of the screen.

You connect to it with a web browser, and it sends back a java applet, that lets you hit buttons on a virtual receiver. Those presses get sent back to the receiver, and are inserted into the IR Remote command queue. The display is sampled, and returned to the applet in a fairly continuous (and nearly seamlessly real-time) stream.

The only problem with it (as I mentioned in another post in the Technical section) is that, while it's cool for remotely controlling a system, it's not really suitable for scripting remote control. There's no readable response codes that a script can trap to know that, yes, I really did select Alan Parsons. If another album got inserted without your knowing it, you may have just selected your wife's Abba collection (urgh!)

Nonetheless, I'd definitely recommend looking into it. http://fvgestel.dyndns.org/receiver . Basically, you've got to make some changes to the .arf file as distributed by SonicBlue, and you can't do that with simply WinZip. There's a tweak program (http://www.norman.cx/receiver/receiver-tweaker.asp), but it only lets you change the kernel -- you'll need to add more to it than just that one file. Search on the forum here for tips or tricks for modifying the .arf file (we can't simply distribute updated copies of it because of the copyrighted code within it).

Good luck!

The only problem with it (as I mentioned in another post in the Technical section) is that, while it's cool for remotely controlling a system, it's not really suitable for scripting remote control.

I see what you're saying now. I didn't understand what you meant over in that other thread. Now I get it. Displayserver doesn't do that, you're right. Still, it does let you remote-control the box if you can get it to work, right? (You're saying you did get it to work on some of your boxes and it did have the virtual buttons? Wasn't sure if Frank had gotten that far with it.)

There's no readable response codes that a script can trap to know that, yes, I really did select Alan Parsons.

Oh, it's there, they just coded it to return NULL for queries on Alan Parsons, Steve Winwood, ELO, and The Steve Miller Band.

The only problem with it (as I mentioned in another post in the Technical section) is that, while it's cool for remotely controlling a system, it's not really suitable for scripting remote control. There's no readable response codes that a script can trap to know that, yes, I really did select Alan Parsons. If another album got inserted without your knowing it, you may have just selected your wife's Abba collection (urgh!)

In theory a kernel hack could achieve this as it could read the screen to see where it had got in the menus. However I'm not sure if there is going to be enough spare CPU available on the box to do this sort of thing.

I am thinking of a different approach to this. I and a friend are planning to write our own server software for the Receiver (yes, I know there are a couple of projects out there already, but we wanted a good project to cut our .NET teeth on).

Once you have our own server software that can serve up dynamic list of tracks (as against the static list that the normal server software does) then you could achieve this sort of scripting. The way it would work was this:

- you have a special artist name that would always appear at the bottom of the list of artists
- you would hack the kernel to add a http server (I am already planning to add this to my port of the VolAdj patch) that can accept data to be inserted into the IR stream
- when a scripting action occurs you have the server send a series of commands to the Receiver that makes it go into the artists menu and select the special artist
- the receiver then requests the list of artist's tracks from the server
- the server gives the receiver the dynamic lists of tracks that the user wanted
- the server waits and then sends the commands to the Receiver the select "All music" for the artist (the server could also use the web server on the Receiver to peek at the screen to check when it was ready for the "All music" command)

The benefit of this is that most of the logic load is on the server.

Anyway, I'm afraid none of this is going to happen soon. Before I start on the server I need to add code to my Tweaked Receiver kernel (http://www.norman.cx/receiver/) so that you can control the VolAdj level.