Welcome to the RemoteVideo sourceforge site. This project came about because I'm sick of having a keyboard cord dangling across my loungeroom to control the PC I use to watch movies on my TV and I don't see any reason to buy a media center which won't even support all the formats I have or be upgradable in the future just so I can have a remote control.
So without further ado here's some questions that might be on your mind and once I have a real site will probably be in a FAQ.
What is it?
Well to this I have to have three answers, technical, non-technical and pedantic.
To a non-technical user I'd say it's a way to remote control the video player on your Windows computer using a Windows CE handset.
To a technical person I'd say it's a combination of a media server running off VLC's 3rd party API's which listens for TCP commands and a Windows CE client which issues TCP commands (Typically via 802.11 wireless networking, but any protocol your handset will do TCP over will work). Both are written using .NET, the server in the 2.0 framework and the mobile application in the windows CE framework. The targetted host OS is Windows, however once there is a stable release I will be looking into any changes required to make the code run under Mono to allow the applications to run on Linux and Mac machines also.
To a pedantic person I'd say it's a pile of code that doesn't quite work yet, but I intend to remove this answer over the coming months.
Why haven't you got more content?
As you can see, this site hasn't come very far yet. One big reason for this is that my current phase of development is one of experimentation.
The reason I took on this project was two-fold, one cause I thought it'd be a cool application to have, and the other being that I thought I'd learn a lot of useful things. That's not to say I can't code yet, I've written many applications and work full-time as a developer, but I have never developed against VLC's API's before nor have I developed for Windows Mobile (Though I have developed J2ME apps before) so there is some learning curve.
As such much of this experimentation is not really things I want to release to the world as an actual project until I have refactored my testing hack-jobs into structured, commented libraries, I don't want to find myself on the homepage of TDWTF for doing a quick hack-job to understand a feature.
Rest assured I am working on finalizing individual modules so that I can start getting some code up on the site
What can I do to help?
If you are a graphics designer, I'd really love to hear from you. That's one area I seriously lack in. The biggest thing I'd be interested in is help skinning the remote control. The documentation on how to create a skin is something I hope to release early (Earlier even than the app) in hopes of receiving a few submissions so I can get a decent skin when I do my first release (Otherwise I'll have to knock up one).
If you are a developer, to be honest until I get an initial stable release I intend to fly solo on this. Once I have a stable working base version I'm happy to get help on enhancements, ports to different systems (Linux/Mac/J2ME/IPhone), bug fixes, efficiency tweaks and anything you can throw at me. I just want to get my feet firmly on the ground before you start throwing.
If you are a regular user, just watch this space. The best thing you can do to make me happy is to download a copy of this app once it's released and tell some of your friends. There's no donations available to this project, and will not be until I think I have a product that might justify it, so if you want to donate please pick one of linked sites in the sidebar of this site (All of which have helped RemoteVideo become more than a mere thought in the back of my head, and none of which I have any financial connection to).
You didn't answer my question
No way will I get them all. Jump on the forums and give me a shout.