iPhone remote for MythTV

kyle — Tue, 14 Aug 2007 10:38:40 -0500

Last weekend, I finally got my MythTV box up and running, thanks to the MythDora distribution. It works like a charm, but I was dismayed by the idea of having to sit near the computer to use the keyboard and not enthused by the idea of setting up drivers for a wireless keyboard. After a bit of research on the compatible remotes out there, I decided to build my own to run on my iPhone. Here it is in action:

After trying out a few options I settled on an HTML web front end with a little bit of AJAX, which makes calls to a python CGI script. These pieces are hosted on the MythTV server, and I access them through the iPhone's web browser over my local network via WiFi. The icons are from the Nuvola set. I have plans in the future to replace them with icons that are more consistent with the iPhone GUI.

Here are screenshots of how it turned out:

Buttons in screenshot one (left to right) are: main menu, live TV, video gallery, play DVD, play music. The second row (Navigation) buttons allow movement through the menus. Third row: escape, switch to keypad view, enter. On the keypad screen, the menu icon toggles back to the menu view.

And if you're interested, I've put up an online version of the remote that I haven't tested in anything other than my iPhone, so please don't hate me if it shows up broken in IE.

Finally, for those of you who want to give this a shot for yourself, I've made a tarball with all of the the various pieces that went into making this work, along with some instructions that may or may not work for you. Good luck.

Legatissimo.info - howto

iPhone remote for MythTV