[ubuntu-uk] Remote control mencoder

[Simon Greenwood]

On 3 March 2010 22:27, Rob Beard <rob at esdelle.co.uk> wrote:

> 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).
>
>
While I'm all for technical solutions, wouldn't it be less painful to run a
Y-connector from the aerial point that they presumably have in their living
room into the bedroom? Ten or fifteen metres of cable isn't expensive and it
should go around doors under the carpet, or it can be a temporary solution.

For the record mencoder does support lirc, the Linux remote control project,
and I've got it to work as a streaming solution in the past with MythTV - in
fact Myth will stream any channel once it's set up, but as I say, it sounds
like too much work and is prone to go wrong.

Simon

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