Remuco as Remote for Your Media Player

Those with bluetooth or wifi on their machines will most likely enjoy using Remuco, an application to let you use your mobile phone as a remote control. Right now, Remuco can be used with the following media players:

• Amarok
• Audacious
• Banshee
• Exaile
• MPD
• Rhythmbox
• Totem
• TVtime
• VLC
• XMMS2

You may use any of the above mentioned applications on your Linux box but features with regards to control, information displayed, and browsing depend on which one of them you use. If you’re using Banshee, there are no browsing features available. But you could control the volume, skip to the next track (or go to the previous one), toggle shuffle mode, toggle repeat mode and seek forward as well as backward in the currently playing track. Other features such as browsing the playlist and/or media library are mostly availble to the other media players. For a complete list of features and media players, check out the Remuco Features page on their wiki.

The Remuco project has packages for Arch Linux, Debian, Gentoo and Ubuntu. If you’re using any of the mentioned distros, you should have a way to install the package instead of installing from source.

Hmm. Right now, the information available regarding mobile devices you could use with Remuco are limited. Basically you need JavaME support (MIDP ≥ 2.0, CLDC ≥ 1.1). If you use Bluetooth to connect to a player adapter, there must be JSR-82 (Java Bluetooth) support too. Nevertheless it looks like an interesting thing to use. Too bad I have to borrow someone’s bluetooth dongle first to try it out. That or I could try using my older laptop once I get to the office.

But I think it’s cool, especially if you’re reading a book and you’re using your computer to play music in the background. Sometimes it’s just too fun lying down and reading rather than having to go up and change and the music. I hope that more phones could be tested and checked if Remuco works just fine with them too.

Thanks to the Ubuntu Manual for giving information about how to install Remuco on Ubuntu Karmic, Jaunty and Intrepid. I wouldn’t have known about this app if not for the blog entry.