Ok. I got this to work and i love it. A very simple solution now that i learned a little bit more about linux.
i enabled the TCP port front end remote telnet socket option under Settings>General>General as mentioned and restarted the frontend.
Code:
/etc/init.d/gdm restart
Its called telnet but you don't need to turn on telnet in inet.d or install telnetd or anything because it uses a socket connection to localhost to the mythfrontend. Anyway, there was two issues for me.
1. It didn't work from root but did work from user mythtv
Code:
root@mythtvmaster:/home/mythtv# telnet mythtvmaster 6546
Trying 127.0.0.1...
telnet: Unable to connect to remote host: Connection refused
2. I needed a pearl module, but i had never used perl.
Code:
#!/usr/bin/perl
use Net::Telnet;
$host = "localhost";
$port = 6546;
$channel = 26;
$telnet = new Net::Telnet ( Timeout=>10,
Port=>$port,
Errmode=>'die');
my $length = length($channel);
my $counter = 0;
my $temp;
$telnet->open( $host );
$telnet->waitfor('/#/i');
$telnet->print('jump playbackrecordings');
$telnet->waitfor('/#/i');
$telnet->print('key enter');
$telnet->waitfor('/#/i');
$telnet->print('key enter');
$telnet->waitfor('/#/i');
$telnet->print('exit');
3. I needed the Net::Telnet module
From memory this is what i did:
/usr/src# perl -MCPAN -e shell
follow configuration
install Term::ReadLine
install Term::ReadKey
install CPAN:Bundle
cpan> install Net:Telnet
Net::Telnet is up to date (3.03).
Now the perl script worked.
Obviously this is rough.
If there is any interest I will go through this more carefully and make a wiki page. Please comment below if you try this with your corrections or suggestions.
I use the script to simply play the most recent recording to wake me up. It works very well. It happens to be the morning news every day. I'd be interested if anyone knows how to play a search result or a filter for say the most recent colbert report recorded. Probably not possible yet unless you have a predictable recording schedule and use the down key a certain number of times. This should work well with mythtmusic too. Shouldn't be long before some smart person adds a config to mythweb thus reviving the mythalarm concept.