Control your XBMC from you iPhone/iPad

If you use your Raspberry Pi as media server you may want to use a remote control. It is not really a good choice to plug in a keyboard and use that for controlling your media player. It is much easier to use a XBMC Remote Control App. One of them is XBMC Remote by joethefox. This app is free.

Attention! There are also commercial XBMC Remote Apps. It may not be useful to wast money to buy such a control app. The free XBMC Remote app does everything that I need.

Configuration

The first step is to install the app from you app store. After that you can connect with you media server. This is quite simple, all you need is:

• iPhone/iPad with XBMC Remote App
• IPhone/iPad has to be connected with your WLAN (the same where your Raspberry Pi is connected to)
• the IP address of your media server
• HTTP Control has to be enabled at your XBMC network settings

If you did everything correct, you now add the media server as host to the app (‚addhost‘ button). There you only need to set the ip address and the port (default is 9090). If you limited access to you XBMC server you also have to set username and password.

Control

There are many things you can do with this app. A few highlights are:

• Wake on LAN
  on the right panel (drag your finger from the right border to the left side) you can find the Wake on LAN option. If you have a server that support wake on LAN you can turn it on with your mobile device. The Raspberry Pi does not support this option.
• direct navigation
  on the left panel you can choose music, movies, pictures and so on.
• remote control
  the remote control function is a virtual control. Here you have buttons. It is very user friendly, because you can choose from different input devices like a normal remote control, a keyboard or event a touch device (like you laptop touchpad).

The remote control app also has a own wiki which can be found here.

Summary

The app store has a wonderful freeware remote control app for your XBMC media server. I use it nearly every day.