home entertainment

I use this cheap dell laptop as a home server.


The server has multiple purposes.

• music server
• radio streaming
  
• control of the central heating
• wakes me up via the musicpals

Music and photos are on a shared external drive. I've done away with cd's long time ago, my whole collection is ripped to mp3, basicly I dont't care about 'quality' as long as it is decent.
I use winamp to play music. Since the drive is shared this can be done from any pc in the house.

There is a nice plugin for winamp that lets you control winamp via http requests. I am a long time user of this plugin, I wrote some perl web pages to control the player and to compose the playlists. All of this works very well but at the time I couldn't use javacript since my pocket pc did not support it.

But hey my new nokia phone does support javascript so time has come to write something new.

The new scripts are php (not that this any better but I converted to php some time ago and php has some nice features so I stick to that). Obviously I also used jquery.

I made some screenshots of the results this far.

winamp remote control

features:

• countdown timer
• player host selection
• transport (play, stop etc)
• playlist
• play mode

radio streaming

playlist management


features

• genre listing
• search function

system control


There is one php page for the tabs, all actions are via control scripts. Host addresses and urls are in simple ini files.

Details in part 2.

winamp
httpq plugin