I'm forking this code off of this project from Maker Musings. It originally supported checking to see how many new episodes there are and you can ask it if there are any new episodes for a certain show.
I've expanded it to support the following features:
- Basic navigation (Up/Down, Left/Right, Page Up/Down, Select, Back, Open Menu)
- Playback control (Play/Pause, Skip, Previous, Stop)
- Shuffle music by artist
- Play random unwatched episode of TV show
- Play random unwatched movie
- Play specific episode of a TV show ('Play season 4 episode 10 of The Office')
- Play specific movie
- Continue watching next episode of last show that was watched
- Play next episode of other show
To get this running, you'll have to have your own server to handle the requests and pass them to your Kodi box. I've found the easiest way to get something up and running is to use OpenShift.
OpenShift makes it easy to get it up and running and it is completely free to use. This way you won't have to worry about spinning up a VPS somewhere and fiddling with SSL certs, WSGI configs, Python packages, ect. Heroku will work fine as well, and has a similar setup, but the free tier requires the dyno to sleep for 6 hours a day and goes to sleep after approximately 30 minutes of inactivity, which would be a hassle to deal with.
Once you have setup an OpenShift account setup, go ahead and install the command line tool (You'll need Ruby installed, and apparently there is some problems with newer versions, so might stick with 1.9 if you run into any issues).
To create a new app, run this from the command line: rhc app create kodi python-2.7. If that runs successfully, you'll see something like this:
Sometimes it doesn't detect that you have git installed, so if it doesn't create a directory called kodi, do a git clone on that Git remote address that it gives you. Now go into the kodi directory and replace the wsgi.py file and add the kodi.py and requirements.txt files from this repo.
Once you have everything ready, you can setup the following environment variables to talk to your Kodi box:
- KODI_ADDRESS
- KODI_PORT
- KODI_USERNAME
- KODI_PASSWORD
You can do this easily from the command line: rhc env set KODI_ADDRESS='kodi.ipaddress' KODI_PORT='8080' KODI_USERNAME='kodi' KODI_PASSWORD='kodi' -a kodi. Changing of course for your settings.
If you would rather not set this up, you can change the values in the kodi.py file instead. Just remember that either way, this transmits your Kodi username and password in plaintext over HTTP, so make sure it's not something that you are using for other accounts.
Of course you'll need to have your Kodi box opened up to the internet via port forwarding. If you don't have a dedicated IP address, you'll also need a dynamic DNS service to give you a static URL to use so you don't have to be constantly change this value.
Once you have this all setup, you'll need to setup an Amazon developer account and start setting up a new Alexa skill.
Here's what it'll look like:
On the next tab, you'll have to paste the alexa.intents file into the first field, and paste the alexa.utterances file in the second field.
The next tab has info about the SSL cert, if you are using OpenShift, select the middle option.
After that is pretty much just information that you can just put whatever into. Don't submit it for certification since only you will be using your server.
Here are a few demo videos showing how to use it. Other commands you can do are in the utterances file.
