iAmpRemote - bridging the gap

For a few months I’ve been playing tv shows on my laptop and viewing them on the TV.  This has worked well, but it’s a bit messy – there are cables running everywhere and it’s a hassle to remove/replace the plugs whenever I want to use my laptop for something else.  Time for a revamp.

The idea was to have a low profile desktop computer sitting on a shelf under the TV.  The computer would have output to the TV and LAN connectivity, but no mouse or keyboard.  There would be a network share which I could drop movies into from my office computer, and I would control Winamp remotely on my iPhone using iAmpRemote.  Winamp would automatically detect any new files and add them to the Media Library.

I expected this to be a pretty straight-forward setup – the tools are readily available and the design is pretty simple.

After setting up the computer and configuring the OS, the last remaining task was to start using iAmpRemote – I have not used this app before, but my needs are pretty simple and it looks like a respectable application, so I expected things would go pretty smoothly.  I was bitterly disappointed to discover that the only way to browse my files with iAmpRemote was using the Media Library Playlists (the iAmpRemote website touts the ability to “control your playlist”, which is just plain wrong unless by “control” you mean “view and select from”).  Winamp does scan my computer for new media files and organizes them into various categories (audio, video, never played etc), but I could not find a way to make Winamp put these files into playlists (and, apart from iAmpRemotes inability to browse the Media Library, there would be no reason for it to do this).

I was unable to find a good alternative to iAmpRemote, and I was also unable to find a tool to make it work well, so I ended up (sigh) writing a console app.

The app is designed to run on the host machine before Winamp is opened (I have it running from a batch file at startup).  It scans a directory (configurable), finds all media files within each subdirectory and puts them into a playlist.  It then saves each playlist into the Media Library AppData folder, and writes an entry for each generated playlist into playlists.xml (everwriting the previous copy of playlists.xml).  This causes each subfolder to appear as a playlist in the Winamp Media Library, which in turn allows iAmpRemote to view my files.

I’m making the program and it’s code (c#, VS2010) publicly available for anyone who needs it - you can find it here.