IR Filechooser

WHAT IS IT?

The Infra Red File Chooser (or short irfc) is a remote controlled menu for selecting files and loading them by an assigned program. It can be used on standalone video/mp3 players for navigating through a list of files. You can add as much filetypes and assoziated programs as you want. By using Perl or Shell scripts you can extend it's usefulness much more. The GUI is created with Perl::GTK and it uses RCU::Lirc to fetch the remote controllers commands.

INSTALLATION

irfc needs some perl modules to run. First you need the Gtk module Debian users can invoke 'apt-get install libgtk-perl' to install it others should install the right RPM or get it direct from CPAN.

perl -MCPAN -e shell
install Event
install RCU

apt-get install libtime-hires-perl

Put the irfc to a place you like it (eg. your home directory).
If you like you can add irfc to your .xsession or .xinit to start it when the X server comes up.

CONFIGURATION

Options

Open the irfc script with your favourite editor and change the configuration variables at top of it.

$MENUDIR

Set this to the full path of your directory structure (See next Chapter)

$CDDRIVE[0]
$CDDRIVE[1]
...

You can define which directories inside your menu structure act as mountpoints for CD-ROM drives. Those will be mounted before shown by irfc and unmounted when the directory is exited. You have to add this path as a usermountable device to your /etc/fstab.

%FILETYPES

This is the most important part. Here you cann assign programs to fileextensions. For example if you want to play all mp3 files with xmms you have to add mp3 => "xmms" to this hash. For more complex commands you can use the §f placeholder, which will be replaced by the selected filename. Note: unknownfiletypes will not be displayed in the Filechooser

%BUTTONS

This hash configures your remote control buttons. Assign the button names as defined in your lircd.conf to the builtin IR Filechooser commands. These Commands are:

[down]

Moves the selection in the list one file down.

[up]

Moves the selection in the list one file up.

[enter]

Runs the associated program with the selected file.

[fast_up]

Moves the selection in the list five files up.

[fast_down]

Moves the selection in the list five files down.

[back]

Goes up one directory (It's like selecting [..] in the list and pressing [enter])

You can run other programs by assigning buttons, too. For example if you want to run xmms by pressing the button named 1 simply add "1" => "xmms" to the hash.

$DROPREPEATS

This slows down the reaction on repeated button presses. For example setting it to 3 only every third repeation of a keypress is recognized.

@WINDOWSIZE

This sets the size of the Window (x,y)

$FONT

This changes the used font of the listbox. To get a valid fontname use the program xfontsel

$USE_POLL

Setting this to 1 will use the polling method of RCU which consumes a lot of CPU time (up to 100%). This is no longer needed as IRFC can now use the event based interface of RCU so leave this setting at 0.

$SHOW_EXT

Set this to 1 if you want to see the filetypes of the files in the list.

Menustructure

Create the directory you named in $MENUDIR and place your files in it. Note: You can use symbolic links to create the wanted menu structure.

Hidden files (beginning with a dot) are not shown in irfc and underscores (_) are converted to blanks.

$ ls -l menu/
total 17
drwxr-xr-x    2 mm       mm             35 Jan 14 12:41 CD
drwxr-xr-x    4 mm       mm             79 Jan  5 16:50 Games
lrwxrwxrwx    1 mm       mm             11 Dec 29 16:18 Movies -> /ftp/moviez
-rw-r--r--    1 mm       mm             34 Dec 29 21:54 Play_MP3s.sh
-rw-r--r--    1 mm       mm             68 Jan  5 18:27 Rip_Audio_CD.sh
-rw-r--r--    1 mm       mm             11 Dec 30 01:49 Shut_Down.sh

%FILETYPES=( sh   => "bash",
             pl   => "perl");

USING IT

Using it is easy: Simply use the defined buttons on your remote control to navigate throug the menu. Subdirectories are marked by []. Selecting a directory changes to it and selecting a file runs the assigned program on it. You can change to an upper directory by selecting the [..] entry.

FEEDBACK

Yes please! Send Ideas, Bugreports and Patches to andi@splitbrain.org

THANKS

Frank Schubert <frank@schokilade.de> for fixing the droprepeats function

"Da Kourier" <dakourier@armitage.gotdns.com> for a hint how to change the fonts

Kees Cook <kees@outflux.net> for

LICENSE

This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.