My Hulu machine IV - IP Remote

I felt so silly when I pointed the TV remote at my Hulu castle and nothing happened. It's not a VCR and there is no infra red receiver there stupid! It's frustrating, I'm gonna live with a keyboard laying in front of it? No! I wanted this to be an appliance.

I fiddled with several things and toyed with a number of ideas, and arrived at the conclusion that I may just have to compromise. I swore I wasn't going to spend a penny on this. Everything had to be from scraps. If there is a will as strong as mine, there is a way. I plugged back in the keyboard and mouse and installed a VNC server. I then sat back on the sofa and remote controlled everything via VNC from my laptop.
Sadly, even though the traffic goes through via my wireless router - essentially a gigabit switch - the speed is only barely acceptable. The video slows down noticeably when VNC is on. I could live with that but the constantly flipping open and shutting the laptop was annoying. The thing is, I don't need the video displayed on my laptop, I just need to be able to control the box's input, via IP...

... via IP. Light bulb. Ding. Ja ja...

My Hulu machine may not have an infra red receiver, it has a wireless receiver, so does my cell phone. Not just that, my Windows Mobile 6 phone has hardware controls for moving things up/down/left/right, just like a remote control.

So I set out to write 2 applications. An IP control server that runs on my Hulu machine, listening to a TCP port that reads a stream of key codes and in turn sends them to the OS as keyboard inputs; and an IP remote control, which is a Windows Mobile application that connects to my Hulu machine and turns button key down/key up messages into a stream of key code sent to the other side of the socket.



See? It works. It's so cool on so many different levels. After all these work, I can finally watch whatever's on TV whenever, from the comfort of my couch.

Viva Hulu. I am determined to enjoy it while it lasts.