Simple Playback controls on Android Phone

I used the api calls to create a very simple, and kinda ugly, playback control app on my Android phone. Hopefully, someone who actually knows what they are doing will see this and make a better version. :grinning: This is not a real remote control, it only controls playback once you start playing back a recording from your regular remote. Or in my case when my wife starts playback, hangs on to the remote, but fails to skip the commercials.

It looks like this:

Step 1.
Download the HTTP Requests Shortcuts app from the Google play store. Link

Step 2.
Create a variable for your channels ip address.
Press the double brackets {}. This will take you to the list of variables. I created a new one called Shieldip. This points to the local ip address of my Nvidia Shield.

I saved this variable. Press the check mark upper right.

Step 3.
Create the actions. Press the plus sign at the bottom of the main screen and it takes you to a screen where you can enter new actions. I picked create new shortcut. This opens this screen:

Here you can enter a name and pick an icon from the built-in choices.

The method is POST and the url is the command from the api calls list. Notice that your variable has to be enclosed in double curly brackets. You could skip defining a variable, and just put your device's ip adress here but I wanted to be able to test this on the various devices where I have channels installed.

This page scrolls down and shows some more options, but since I donā€™t know what any of them mean I didnā€™t enter anything thereā€¦..

You can also long press any of the actions and some options pop up one of which is ā€œPlace on home Screenā€. I used this to create a dedicated Skip ads button on the home screen of my android phone.

If anyone's interested I exported the shortcuts from the app to a json file. You should be able to download this from my google drive, open the Http requests app and import this file. Then I'm thinking you would just change the Shieldip variable to your device and try it out. shortcuts.json

3 Likes

Very cool!!

This is awesome. Itā€™s things like this that we hoped the Channels API would let people do. Accessibility!