Mediaportal: Schedule recordings from remote

Problem

Some days ago I was on travel and forgot to schedule some recording of a film I really wanted to watch later. I decided to invest some time in finding a solution to completely schedule new recordings from remote. This also includes waking up my htpc from any PC on the Internet since my HTPC is not running all the time.

Idea

The idea is simple: My router is connected to the Internet all the time. I use OpenWRT on it so I can easily modify the system. I need to create a simple way to wake up my HTPC using the router and WOL (Wake on lan). When the HTPC is alive I need to be able to controll the scheduling of the Mediaportal TV Server. This is possible using the MP Webserver and Interface.

My solution

The way I set up my router and the HTPC to enable the remote wakeup thing will be documented on a separate page.

So now to the MediaPortal part. It’s quite simple: I have installed MediaPortal as standalone system. So I downloaded the current version of mp-web-interface from the download page.

Then I started the setup. I followed all the install steps until component selection and disabled the MySQL dll – it is not needed when it’s on the same box as the MediaPortal installation and the MySQL server.

After the setup I started to configure the mp-web-interface using the configuration GUI named “Mediaportal Webinterface Manager”. First I set the database parameters to connect to the MySQL database. Then I created a user to log on the webinterface. Note: The userid is not a numeric ID, it is the name you use to login to the mp-web-interface. After that I restarted the service.

Now I tested the connection using the address http://localhost:8080/ in a local browser. After that I checked the firewall settings to pass inbound connections using the TCP port 8080 and tested the access from the local LAN using the hostname of the HTPC instead of localhost.

To be able to access the interface from the Internet I added a firewall rule to my HTPC to redirect incoming traffic on a specific TCP port to the HTPC host on TCP port 8080. Since I get a dynamic IP address from my provider I created a static url (dns entry) using dyndns. The IP address is being updated by the OpenWRT router.

Now I am able to access the running HTPC from the web to schedule recordings at any time.