I built MCE Controller as something that would be useful for my own home. I had minor aspirations of making it do more than it does, but the reality is that I don’t really have the time nor the inclination (it works beautifully for me as is).
Until today I have resisted making it open source for the simple reason that I didn’t really understand what it would take to put the source out there in some controlled manner. I have downloaded apps from SourceForge but have never played with any source code in that way. All I knew was that the tools to upload stuff looked weird.
I finally bit the bullet and just did it. MCE Controller is now an “open source project”. My hope is that a few others will join in and build upon what I started in cool ways. If not, oh well, it still works for me. (My fear is that people will see the code and see how cruddy a programmer I am).
Go to http://kindel.com/products/mcecontroller to get the low-down on what MCE Controller is and does. Then go to http://sourceforge.net/projects/mcecontroller to download the binary or check out the source.
If you are interested in participating in enhancing it let me know.
Oh, MCE Controller is written in C# using VS7.
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Here’s a feature request for whoever’s got the time; how about voice recognition. Even simple commands would be cool like pause, play, next previous etc. I use a plantonics headset with Skype at the moment but I reckon it would be darn cool to able to use it for controlling films and musc as well 🙂 Like you I don’t have the time to explore this though, so if anyone is feeling brave…
… i’m feeling brave
I am trying to tie this in to an AMX system at home. The code I have started for it is really basic for now until I see how this interface works. I can get connection notifications (no onerror messages) on the AMX side and I can see the client connection to the MCE controller server side, but the MCE controller does not flinch when it sees the string, there is no recognition of it. I know the string was sent, I know there were no connection errors, but the command never seems to get through. My system consists of an AMX NI3000, crappy Linksys router (everything on the LAN side, no port restrictions whatsoever) and a custom built Core i7 quad core PC running Vista Ultimate. Vista does not ship with a hyperterminal app and I keep forgetting my laptop at work, so I can’t test it through terminal on a computer running XP. I am 98% sure the AMX code is good, 98% sure the router is not the issue. The question (finally) that I have is this program able to run on Vista? If I get a chance I will run the system while monitoring the protocol with wireshark. The dork in me desperately wants this to work so I can show all of my friends how much of a dork I am. If anyone has any ideas, that would be awesome. Thanks!