Edit: New version posted here: Linky
I have a pretty nice setup at the minute for controlling media from the iPhone using a combination of VLC and vlcremote, more info on lifehacker.
From my previous postings you can see that I’m using VDPAU to make use of the Revo’s GPU however VLC is lacking support for VDPAU which is why I’m using mplayer.
Mplayer handles the VDPAU perfectly however it lacks a web controllable interface and having searched for ages Ive had to make my own!
A bit of background first, mplayer makes use of a fifo or named pipe file which it constantly monitors for input. The users echos commands into the file and mplayer acts on it. What I have set up is a basic PHP page that execute bash echo commands for play/pause/fast forward etc.
To use this you need to have the following:
- Unix OS
- Apache & PHP *or similar web server
- mplayer
- ffmpeg for thumbnails of videos
First off you need to create the named pipes for mplayer to access:
as your normal user execute:
mkdir ~/.mplayer/
mkfifo ~/.mplayer/in
mkfifo ~/.mplayer/out
chmod 777 ~/.mplayer/in
I experimented with a few different ways of starting mplayer in a service mode and found that the process has to have a TTY value for it to access the named pipes, the best method for doing this was using /etc/rc.local paste the following in and edit it to your own settings:
*my code script isn’t wrapping so until its fixed you can have normal text:
su – nino -c “tail -f ~/.mplayer/in | mplayer -slave -idle -fs -vc ffh264vdpau,ffmpeg12vdpau,ffvc1vdpau,ffwmv3vdpau, -ao alsa:device=hw=0.3 -display :0.0 | cat > ~/.mplayer/out”
replace nino with your normal username as well edit the mplayer string with your own options and you MUST have the following options:
-slave -idle -fs -display :0.0
everything else is optional and what i use for the VDPAU GPU
On reboot you should have an mplayer process running with under TTY8
Next step is to download the script:
Mplayer Control V0.1b (10.0 KiB, 260 hits)
Place it in a web servable directory and edit a few parameters:
//Set to the video dir
$r00t = "/media/storage/";
//set the fifo file
$fifo = "/home/nino/.mplayer/in";
//shouldnt need to edit anything else
set $r00t to the root directory of where your media is stored, and fifo to the location your fifo file is.
That *should* be everything good to go and you should be able to browse to the php file and start enjoying mplayer with a remote control! Any issues please post in the comments.
Screenshot:
web interface
