[ubuntu-uk] Remote control mencoder

[Rob Beard]

Hi folks,

A friend of mine's wife is currently fairly bedridden with illness and 
running out of things to keep her amused.  Now they have a TV in their 
bedroom but sods law they haven't got an aerial connection, and being a 
ground floor flat which isn't theirs (it's rented) they can't put in a 
cable, or get reception on a table top aerial.

They did try a TV sender from Argos which worked but only just, and if 
anyone walks past it the picture and sound goes off.

I figured I'd try and be helpful.  They have a laptop running Vista (yes 
I know!) and a Hauppage USB Freeview stick.  I've been borrowing this 
stick now (since about Christmas!) to try and get it working with 
Ubuntu.  It just so happens that someone has managed to get a driver 
together for it and I've finally got the stick working (really well too, 
it picks up everything that my Freeview boxes and TV can pick up, 
whereas my other PCI DVB-T card won't pick up the BBC channels!).

Anyway, I wondered, does anyone know if it's possible to remotely 
control mencoder?

What I was thinking was capturing a Freeview channel on a basic PC 
running Ubuntu (something like a P3 or Athlon 1GHz), and then either 
dump the stream to a file on a samba share (which the laptop can then 
connect to and play on the laptop with something like mplayer) or have 
it stream it so something like VLC can play it.

The issue I'm thinking of though is how to change the channel.  What 
would be ideal is either a way of getting an instance of mplayer on a 
remote PC to talk to mencoder and tell it to change channels etc, or 
setup a very basic web interface which can run in a browser so my 
friend's wife can click a link to channel hop.

Does anyone know if this is possible or has been done?

I'm open to suggestions if there are any other suitable apps other than 
mencoder/mplayer that might do this sort of thing.  I figured 
mencoder/mplayer would be a good choice as I already know a bit about 
how they work.

Only other thing I can think of is something like MythTV, but I'm not 
sure if a P3 1Ghz with 512MB Ram would be up to the job (I guess it 
would only be a backend with something, maybe VLC or XBMC running on the 
laptop to display the channels).

Ta,

Rob