FlipMartin.net

When I watch movies on my TiBook, I like to stream them from the QuickSilver (the TiBook runs much hotter playing a DVD than playing a stream). I use VLC on both machines to do it, and it works fine. But the problem with this approach is that you cannot control VLC on the server from the client (and if you pause the movie from the client, it will continue to play on the server).

Since VLC is scriptable, the obvious way to work around this limitation is to enable and use Remote Apple Events. Enabling this service from the Sharing prefs pane (1) allows to run AppleEvents across the LAN, so in theory all I should have to do in order to toggle VLC on the server between play and pause is to run on the client an AppleScript that goes:

Tell application "VLC" of machine "eppc://10.0.1.2" to play

Unfortunately, VLC (0.8.2) appears to have a bug that prevents it to receive remote AppleEvents (the error returned is something like "The application "VLC" is not running on this machine").

But since VLC works fine when it receives events that come from the machine it's running on, I worked around the problem by writing a little AppleScript application that runs on the server and redirects to VLC the commands it receives as remote AppleEvents. Here's the script:

on relay(thisCommand)
    tell application "VLC"
        if thisCommand = "play" then
            play
        else if thisCommand = "stop" then
            stop
        else if thisCommand = "next" then
            next
        else if thisCommand = "prev" then
            previous
        end if
    end tell
end relay

I saved this script as Application, with the "Stay Open" option checked, and put it (on the server) at ~/Library/Scripts/Applications/VLC/VLCRemoteController, so it appears in the Script menu (2) when VLC is frontmost and I can launch it from there.

Then on the client I created four oneliner scripts, that go:

tell application "VLCRemoteController" of machine "eppc://10.0.1.2" to relay("play")

(saved as ~/Library/Scripts/Applications/VLC/Play-Pause)

tell application "VLCRemoteController" of machine "eppc://10.0.1.2" to relay("stop")

(saved as ~/Library/Scripts/Applications/VLC/Stop)

tell application "VLCRemoteController" of machine "eppc://10.0.1.2" to relay("next")

(saved as ~/Library/Scripts/Applications/VLC/Next)

tell application "VLCRemoteController" of machine "eppc://10.0.1.2" to relay("prev")

(saved as ~/Library/Scripts/Application/VLC/Previous)

That's it: now I have the items "Play-Pause", "Stop", "Next" and "Previous" in the Script menu when VLC is frontmost on the client, and if the VLCRemoteController application is running on the server, I can use these commands to control it.

Pretty cool, uh? And easy, too. Took me longer to write this. :)

(1) To enable remote AppleEvents (to do on both the server and the client):

(2) The Script menu can be enabled in Panther by double-clicking on /Applications/AppleScript/Script Menu, and in Tiger from /Applications/AppleScript/AppleScript Utility.