This little project is written to allow easy control of mpv running on a little raspberry pi which has a monitor connected to it, but no keyboard.
The project is built with two components. jakserver is the tiniest HTTP server, which fully delegates request handling to a subprocess running a single possible script. See jakserver(1) for more information on it. It's great for prototyping and not worrying about configuring a full apache or httpd.
The other component is the handler.sh which implements the
"remote control" web page. This makes sure to run a daemonized mpv(1) and
talks to it by way of its inbuilt --input-ipc-server.
In my case, mpv(1) is running in a sway(1) session.
The web interface (handler.sh) is a barebones remote control.
You can paste a local path or a weblink (supported by mpv(1) by way of
yt-dlp(1)) and hit Load to play. Alternatively, you can browse the local
file system; video and audio files will have a button to start playing. Other
than that, play/pause, stop, seek etc are pretty self explanatory.
The Turn Off button is a panic button which shuts down the remote mpv in case
anything went haywire. Or, just if you want to shut down that process. The stop
button merely instructs mpv to stop playing, the process continues to hang
around in the background.
There are example handlers available if you want the server to do something else.
Install jakserver
make
make install
Put the handler.sh script somewhere intelligent (e.g. /var/www/handler.sh), then run jakserver
install -m 755 -D handler.sh /var/www/handler.sh
env DISPLAY=:0 jakserver -x /var/www/handler.sh -p 8080
You should set up a chroot(1) in /var/www and/or run jakserver as
a somewhat limitted user. Some sort of socket needs to be poked through the
chroot (mpv ipc socket, X11 socket, Wayland socket etc).
You can customize the handler.sh script to do what you want. E.g. add
support for feh(1) to look at pictures, or playlist support, etc. There are
other examples if you want the server to do
something else which is more complicated.
There's an example systemd unit which you can drop
in /etc/systemd/system/mpvkiosk.service and turn it on at boot. In my case,
I have sway(1) autostart and autologin, and it has the advantage that any
app is effectively full screen by default. sway starts up as wayland-1 by
default, gnome-shell may start up as wayland-0. For X11 systems, you'd need
to set DISPLAY=:0 or whatever it was started as.