htpicker is a simple home theater frontend program that lets you browse directories and launch arbitrary files with programs of your choosing.
You will need Python, the WebKit library (libwebkit) as well as the Python GTK bindings for it (pywebkitgtk; the Ubuntu package is python-webkit).
pylirc is optional and will enable LIRC (remote control) support if installed. You can either install it with your native package manager, or use Python's easy_install, like this:
$ sudo easy_install pylirc
There are no releases yet, so to download it, you will need to have git installed. Then, clone the git repository, like so:
$ git clone https://github.com/mackstann/htpicker
And then, to install it:
$ cd htpicker
$ python setup.py build
$ sudo python setup.py install
$ htpicker [directory]
[directory] is optional and defaults to the current directory.
After its first run, you will now have a ~/.htpickerrc config file that you can edit to change a few things:
- which programs are used to play given filename patterns.
- which filename patterns should be ignored/hidden altogether.
- various feature toggles like fullscreen and animations.
You can control htpicker by any combination of keyboard, joystick, or remote control. It only cares about 6 buttons: left, right, up, down, "select", and "back". Up and down scroll through menu choices. Right displays the options menu. Left closes it. "Back" should be self-explanatory. "Select" is what you would generally think of as "OK" or "confirm" or "go".
The enter key acts as "select". There is no keyboard mapping for a "back" button, but it will be coming soon. You can get around this by scrolling to the top and selecting the parent directory.
Any standard USB HID joystick recognized by Linux should work. The button numbered #1 by the hardware will act as a "back" button, and every other button will act as a select/OK button. The jstest program (not a part of htpicker) may be helpful in figuring out the button configuration of your joystick. If multiple joysticks are present, htpicker will listen to all of them.
htpicker can be controlled by a remote control via LIRC. Get LIRC installed and configured for your remote, then see the example config file in htpicker's extras directory (or look here: http://github.com/mackstann/htpicker/tree/master/extras). There's one config file for htpicker itself, and another that you may find useful for controlling mplayer.
I created htpicker because I was unsatisfied with all other HTPC frontend software I've tried. They're all complicated monstrosities and I seem to have a talent for finding their bugs. All I really wanted was a way to browse a directory structure in a TV-friendly visual format, and launch files with external programs (e.g. a video with mplayer, or a video game ROM with an emulator).
There are no over-complicated plugins, scripts, XML files, or anything like that. There is one small configuration file located at ~/.htpickerrc. This file will be created for you the first time you run htpicker. The meat of this config file is mapping certain directories and/or file extensions to programs that can play them. The stock config file sets up a few reasonable defaults, such as using mplayer to play files in ~/Videos as well as files with common video filename extensions, and playing a couple types of video game ROMs with their respective console emulators. You can change or expand these settings to play any file with any program you want.
And why not just use HTML and Javascript for the UI? So that's what I've done. The program you run consists of three parts: The first is a generic browser window, using WebKit, the same HTML engine used by Chrome, Safari, and the iPhone and Android browsers. The second part is the HTML and Javascript web page that this browser displays. The third is a backend program that gets requests from the webpage and executes actions that are impossible from within a webpage, such as reading the contents of a directory on the filesystem, or executing a program to play a file.
Since htpicker's GUI is written in HTML and JavaScript (using WebKit), it does not engage any special video modes or cause problems with switching to other programs. It can run in a window or fullscreen (the toggle is in the config file). Despite using WebKit for its GUI, it is not a web application, and does not access the network in any way.