Re: [Rhythmbox-devel] Bluetooth remote controller

[Gisli Ottarsson <gisli ottarsson mscsoftware com>]

All:

A quick testimonial.

I've spent a couple of days with Jonatan's system and I can say that
it is quite impressive, particularly given the 0.0.1 version number.

Based on his June 27th post, when it came time to upgrade my cell
phone, I decided to get the same one he is using (Sony-Ericsson T630
(very nice)).  I then purchased a USB Bluetooth dongle (MSI PC2PC) to
communicate with it.

Enabling Bluetooth on my Debian laptop (2.4 kernel) was a cinch.  After
about one hour of head-scratching I was able to ping my cell phone and
soon after that I fired up Jonatan's Blue Remote application (a sketchy
log of my journey is available upon request).  A new "Rhythmbox" menu
appeared on my cell phone with four entries:

Previous
Next
Song Info
Play/Pause

These worked pretty much as advertised.  The two problems I encountered
were:

  1)  If I take my cell phone out of range (like to the bathroom), the
       connection dies and I must re-establish it from the laptop.  

  2)  If I send the commands too rapidly (e.g. Play-Pause-Play-Pause...)
       I can cause the program to stop responding.

Song Info is particularly sweet.  It pulls all the ID3 info of the
currently playing song out to the cell phone and displays it.  As a
nice extra touch, the song title is displayed below the name of the
phone provider on the main screen.

The clincher?  As I was monkeying around with this, I received a call
and the application *paused* the playing of the music.  Nice!

Earlier, I had convinced myself that if I could only remote-control the
'next' button (to skip over boring songs in random mode), I'd be a
happy man, but Blue Remote leaves me lusting for more.

Reading through the code I sense that Blue Remote may have more tricks
up its sleeve (e.g., Shuffle and Repeat toggles), but that these may
have been disabled, possibly due to the Bonobo issues Jonatan mentions
in his post. Those features aside, it would be nice to be able to
change volume and do some rudimentary searching from the phone, but
perhaps this is beyond the capabilities of the existing Bonobo
interface.

If any of you have a Bluetooth capable Sony-Ericsson cell phone, I
highly recommend taking Jonatan's application for a spin.  I do not
regret purchasing the T630 with Blue Remote in mind.  Unfortunately,
the command language used to communicate with the phone looks like it
might be fairly specific to Ericsson phones (I may be wrong) and I
don't know how hard it would be to adapt it to other phones.

Thanks for the nice hack, Jonatan.  I'm sorry my skills are too limited
to give you the Bonobo feedback you requested.

  Gisli




On Sun, 2004-06-27 at 20:52, Jonatan Magnusson wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I have spent some days fighting libbonobo and have created a
> bluetooth remote control program for Rhythmbox. I'm quite
> positive the bonobo-part is severely broken and would
> love to have some feedback on it. I have had to disable
> some features which, for unknown reasons, blocked in
> bonobo_pbclient_get_boolean(), e.t.c.
> 
> It is available here:
> 
> http://cardhu.sskk.org/~jonatan/blueremote.php