A universal remote for your softwares

goffi il y a 10 ans GNU-Linux jabber-xmpp-en SàT projet Libre

G'day,
Salut à Toi (SàT) now allows to easily create a remote for most of your softwares, and to share it with permissions management.
Suppose that you are in a flatshare, and you want that your flatmates can change the music of the Amarok running in your living room: the following command is all you need for that:

jp ad-hoc remote -g flatmates -- amarok

where "flatmates" is the name of the group which can control Amarok. You may also want to remote control Okular (e.g. for a talk), or VLC on your phone.
Below is an example with VLC.
telecommande_-_jp_-_1_-_aide.png


The syntax may seem complex in apparence, it's actualy very simple:
telecommande_-_jp_-_2_-_vlc.png
  • " jp ad-hoc remote" tell that we want a remote control
  • "-pgoffi" say thaat we want to use the profile "goffi", but if it's the default profile, it's not needed
  • "-cl" the "-c" means "connect this profile if it's not already done", the "-l" means that we want to loop on commands (after launching a command, we will return to the command menu instead of finishing the ad-hoc session).
  • "-g coloc" is a filter (coloc mean "flatmates" in french): it tells that in addition of your own jid, the jids from the group "coloc" are allowed to use the remote
  • " -- vlc" the "--" is just here to terminate optional arguments, and "vlc" is the name of the software to control.

once the command entered, SàT fill look in D-Bus's Session bus to find buses which have "vlc" in their names, and add commands which don't need arguments. The output show what has been found.

Now, let's see how we can use the remote in Libervia (web interface of SàT):



telecommande_-_libervia_-_1.png

We use the remote with the ad-hoc "commands" menu


telecommande_-_libervia_-_2.png
we enter the jid which exported the remote. So far, we have to enter manualy the full jid, but in the future, a simple right click should be enough.


telecommande_-_libervia_-_3.png
vlc is indeed visible in commands


telecommande_-_libervia_-_4.png
and voilà ! Commands are available. Once again, it's a bit unfriendly at the moment, but it will be easy to replace common names like "play", "stop", "previous", etc with nice icons...


telecommande_-_gajim_-_1.png

telecommande_-_gajim_-_2.png
And it's of course working with every XMPP clients featuring ad-hoc commands, like Gajim or Psi (here Louise can use the remote control created by Goffi because she is in her group "coloc").
There are many advantages: ease of use, it's generic (the software just need to have its commands exported via D-Bus, which is pretty common on freedesktop environments like Kde, Gnome or XFCE), authorisation can be easily managed, and it works everywhere where an XMPP client featuring ad-hoc commands is available. An another proof that XMPP can be used for far more than just instant messaging, and a demonstration of the potential of jp, the command line frontend of SàT...

To conclude, a short demo video (in french).

As usual, to watch the video you can use a recent browser (the last Firefox/Iceweasel for example).
You can also use VLC (version >=1.1 only), by using the "Media/Open Netword Stream" menu and by entering this URL: http://www.goffi.org/videos/pr%c3%a9sentation_S%c3%a0T_7_t%c3%a9l%c3%a9commande_universelle.webm
Last but not least, you can use mplayer:: mplayer "http://www.goffi.org/videos/pr%c3%a9sentation_S%c3%a0T_7_t%c3%a9l%c3%a9commande_universelle.webm"

this video is licenced under Creative Common BY-SA