Kludge It

There's a Chrome extension called Play To XBMC which adds a little button that will send a YouTube, Vimeo, or CollegeHumor video to XBMC - provided you have the YouTube plugin installed. This is a lot more convenient that using XBMC to search directly, if you don't have a keyboard plugged into the XBMC box. The XBMC iPlayer plugin suffers from the same problem that browsing/searching aren't easy without a keyboard, so I wondered if I could make a chrome extension that would do the same for iPlayer. Chrome extensions are packages of javascript, html, and image files that get unpacked by Chrome when they're installed. You make a Manifest file (which is a JSON file) that tells Chrome what icons to include, what sort of package it is, etc. The Play To XBMC extension is a browser one - the button is always there. I made mine page specific - it only appears on valid iPlayer episode pages. You do this by putting in a javascript page that runs in the background every time ...

Since the 700 Mhz Raspberry Pi runs XBMC perfectly, I wondered if it would be possible to run it usefully on the G3 PPC iMac that we have lying around. With two devices, I could also do multi-room music syncing, which might be useful if I have a party coming up, perhaps. To get Linux on a PPC iMac, you need to get a Debian PPC installer , and burn it onto a USB key. To get into Open Firmware, you start up the machine with the CMD + OPT + O + F keys - I spent a long time not getting this right because I didn't know which keys CMD and OPT were. The CMD key is the one with the quad cloverleaf, and the OPT is alt key (which has the strange jumping-line symbol as well). Open Firmware will boot a Debian PPC install USB with the command: boot usb1/disk@1:2,\\yaboot (If this doesn't work, the devices might be wrong. Use dev / ls and devalias to find them out). Then at the boot: prompt you type install url=mintppc.org ..and that installs mint from the internet. Then ...

Problem:  I want to send JSON-RPC commands to XBMC on my Raspberry Pi. The XBMC install on there will allow JSON-RPC commands from the local box or a remote box, but I've passworded it. The easiest way to talk to the RPC interface through python appears to be using the python-jsonrpc library from here . The problem is that there's no way to send a login and a password. Investigation: Here's some simple code that should work (if passwords weren't turned on): from jsonrpc import ServiceProxy s = ServiceProxy("http://127.0.0.1:8000/jsonrpc") print s.GUI.ShowNotification("Hello!","This is a message") if the library supported login/password combos in urls, I could do this: from jsonrpc import ServiceProxy s = ServiceProxy("http://user:password@127.0.0.1:8000/jsonrpc") print s.GUI.ShowNotification("Hello!","This is a message") ..but it doesn't. If I try it that way the library ...