Remote control over bluetooth

[drmrbrewer]

I have an external bluetooth speaker I use with my bold. When playing stuff in MediaPlayer, the track skip/pause buttons on the speaker control the mediaplayer remotely, which is very neat (so that I can skip/pause even when my bold goes into password mode, and the speaker buttons are easier to access and less dangerous to operate when driving ).

However, this doesn't seem to work in the podtrapper interface. Would be great if it did. Don't know if A2DP has anything to do with it; some sort of standard for audio transmission for portable devices which apparently is used between the bold and the speaker -- but not sure if that is only for streaming music from device to receiver rather than for control signals in the other direction.

I could make the podcasts visible in mediaplayer and play from there, but there are two problems I see with this...

Firstly, it is not clear to me whether all podcasts will appear under the "podcast" genre for ease of selection -- should they? I do have at least one "stray" podcast (see another post).

Secondly, once in the mediaplayer, I can't use Play All or Shuffle to play just my music -- can I filter out the podcast genre? Or perhaps I could use a playlist and add all except podcasts (not sure if that's possible without doing it one-by-one though).

Any thoughts welcome!

Mike

[marwatk]

However, this doesn't seem to work in the podtrapper interface.

Unfortunately this is a limitation in the Blackberry OS. As far as I've been able to determine (I would *love* to be proven wrong), RIM doesn't provide access to media control buttons to third party applications (even for wired headsets). Additionally, third party applications can't see key presses when the application is in the background (hence the need for a built-in keylock in podtrapper).

Firstly, it is not clear to me whether all podcasts will appear under the "podcast" genre for ease of selection -- should they?

PodTrapper doesn't [yet?] support writing meta data to media files, so it must rely on whatever the author of the Podcast provides, which, in most cases, sucks. Bad. I'd like to do this eventually, but it's going to be a *lot* of work (if it's possible, RIM api's are... difficult to use for random file access, though to be fair that has more to do with J2ME than RIM).

What that means is that you can't really rely on the meta data in any podcast to be accurate, much less consistent.

I really really wish RIM would open up the media controls, but so far no luck.

-Marcus

[drmrbrewer]

It's a shame you're hampered by what RIM decided to do or not do. I think this lack of remote control is a big limitation. Hope you do manage to do metadata, so we can use the mediaplayer. Even if just the genre were written (podcast) that would be enough to differentiate from music in the mediapayer.