How to use Your Mobile Phone as Remote for your Linux Media Player

One of the Accessories that comes shipped with my Dell M1330 laptop is a media Remote control which allows the laptop media player to be controlled remotely. Unfortunately Dell in their wisdom left this cool accessory out of the default configuration of the M1330 that ships with Ubuntu pre-installed. Thankfully there is an even better tool available which is much more useful than the XPS media remote, Its is called Remuco

Remuco is a duplex remote control system for Linux media players and mobile devices equipped with Bluetooth or WiFi.

With Remuco, you can remotely control your favorite media player. You can switch to the next, previous, or any other media within the current playlist, browse your media library and activate other playlists, rate your media, adjust volume, and more. On the mobile device (the remote control), it displays information about the current media, including cover art.

source

**Ok the name is by no means cool or an a good indicator of what it can do, some of its features include**

Features

Remuco allows you to control:

* Playback

*Seek forward or backward in current playing item

*Set the playlist to repeat or shuffle

*Control volume

*Rate,

*Tag Media being played

on your PC from your mobile phone

It also Displays:

*Current playing songs including album art

*Volume level

*Progress level of current playing song and its current rating

Media browser features includes:

*Browse Currently active playlist and apply actions to them

*Browse the play queue and apply actions to them

*Browse the players media library and apply actions to them

*search for items in the player’s media library and apply actions to items in the search result

*browse the local filesystem and apply actions to files

*** Not all feature is available on all media player example Rhythmbox seems to be better support compared or other media player***

Installation

Installation of Remuco is in two part, A player adapter is installed on your PC and the client on your mobile device

How to install the player adapter:

(K)Ubuntu

First you need to add the 3rd party repository to your sources.list this can be done from synaptic

System -> Administration -> Synaptic Manager -> Settings -> Repositories.

Here you can enable the repositories for Ubuntu Software and Third Party Software.

For Third Party Software select Add -> enter the repository’s address.

Ubuntu 9.04

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/remuco-team/ppa/ubuntu jaunty main

Ubuntu 8.10

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/remuco-team/ppa/ubuntu intrepid main

Ubuntu 8.04

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/remuco-team/ppa/ubuntu hardy main

Now you need install the repository Key

Open your terminal and enter:

sudo apt-key adv --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com --recv-keys 51A6F565

Now you will need to reload your sources by clicking the reload button on synaptic once done search for the team remuco, and you will see a list of remuco adapters for different Media players for linux

e.g I am on kde and i use amarok so i just installed the remuco-amarok package

Other Linux Distros can check here for installation Instructions

you now need to add remuco to the list of startup application

Amarok

The Amarok adapter requires Amarok 2.

The Amarok adapter can be started with:

remuco-amarok

Audacious

The Audacious adapter can be started with:

remuco-audacious

Banshee

The Banshee adapter requires Banshee ≥ 1.4.

The Banshee adapter can be started with:

remuco-banshee

MPD

The MPD adapter requires MPD ≥ 0.13.

The MPD adapter can be started with:

remuco-mpd

Rhythmbox

Start Rhythmbox and activate the plugin Remuco in the menu Edit → Plugins.

Totem

The Totem adapter requires Totem ≥ 2.22.

Start Totem and activate the plugin Remuco in the menu Edit → Plugins.

TVtime

The TVtime adapter requires TVtime ≥ 1.0.

The TVtime adapter can be started with:

remuco-tvtime

NOTE: With the exception of Rhythmbox and Totem, Remuco adapter for other Media players can be started automatically by adding remuco-media-player name to your startup session e.g for amarok add remuco-amarok to (gnome) System/Preference/Sessions (or startup application). (KDE) System-settings/ Advance Autostart

Client side installation

Installation on your mobile can be done by downloading remuco package here (the latest version on remuco in blog time is 0.9.0) extract the .tar.gz and goto /client/app/ and send the .jar file to your mobile device and install it from there

(Note: The client requires a mobile device with JavaME support (MIDP ≥ 2.0, CLDC ≥ 1.1). If you use Bluetooth to connect to a player adapter, additionally JSR-82 (Java Bluetooth) must be supported.)

Once installed on the device in my case i open terminal and run the following command remuco-amarok then i start amarok and start the client on my Nokia E71

Connected remuco to my laptop, it did its thing and yola i was able to control my amarok player from my phone.

Remember to first go to More and key-binding to set your own control key preference

Happy listening and I hope this helps someone .. (sorry if this is badly written haven’t had time to blog in a while been very busy so am a bit rusty i guess)

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