Windows Volume Mixer over LAN or Android

[wirednuts]

please, someone steal my idea already. i thought about something like this since vista debuted. its simple, your htpc's volume mixer on another device. so i can control the volume of each program running seperately without having to lose focus of the screen im on.

i know i could add like a small touchscreen monitor to my htpc and just leave the volume mixer there, but you cant use it unless you drop focus of what youre on, and thats usually a fullscreen program. so its pretty useless.

so i need it to be on a seperate device, like an android phone. i already have one as my htpc remote / skype phone, so adding a volume mixer would be great. i like to switch between multiple things like music, games and tv... and its so much nicer to just leave all of those things running and lower the volumes for them individually, but its such a pain to access the volume mixer...

 

[RadiclDreamer]

Is an infrared receiver and remote out of the question? I've seen tons of people do this and its cheap and reliable.

 

[wirednuts]

well yeah, for master volume it works great.. thats what i do. but i like to switch between multiple sound sources, ie wmc, winamp, flash video in a browser... etc. you cant do that in any other way then the built in volume mixer as far as i know.

and i thought the whole point of ms separating the audio sources was so people could easily control them. but you cant, you always have to shift focus to the main screen, and even worse in windows media center you have to minimize the window first. its just a pita, and i would love to have the volume mixer on a different device.

 

[mfenn]

I expect such a thing would be fairly simple to code up if you didn't mind putting in the work. The basic components would be:

A: A background service that hooks into the volume control APIs and exposes them as a web service listening on some port.

B: An android (or whatever) app that draws a simple interface and makes the appropriate web services calls to component A to actually implement the change.

 

[wirednuts]

ugh, one of many apps i have ideas for. dont companies hire people for their creative ideas?

i would love to program it myself, but i have no such skills. i tried html back in the day, it was tedious to say the best of things.

but if i could, i would make the best htpc remote for android imaginable. i could charge $50 for it. i have had a lack of proper remote control for my htpc for years now... so much experience that cannot be tapped

so far the two best are Gremote and Unified remote. just combining those two into one would help a lot... but both have so many weaknesses its just sad.