Intro
I’ve created a Chumby widget to act as a basic remote display for XBMC. I’ve been using it and reworking it over the last couple of weeks and I think it’s now in a state where I can make it available for others to try. It works by retreiving an RSS feed from the Xbox that contains a list of the next 5 tracks in the music playlist. If no music is playing, the RSS feed will be empty. To achieve this I’ve written a simple web page that sits on the Xbox and uses the XBMC API to retreive information about the current playlist. The widget also uses XBMC’s http API to provide basic controls to play, pause and skip tracks. This is my first attempt at using ActionScript so the functionality is fairly basic, but if others find it useful I may add more features, or release the sourcecode.

Installation
To get the widget running, download this zip file and copy the contents to the “web” folder on your xbox (usually /e:/apps/xbmc/web). The zip contains the web page to generate the RSS and a crossdomain.xml file to make the RSS accessible from the Chumby. You may need to edit the playlist.asp file to configure the IP address of your xbox which defaults to 10.0.0.5 – you can find this from the Settings > Network Settings screen in XBMC. Also, from the settings screen in XBMC make sure that the web server is enabled and doesn’t require a password.

Next, just log in to your profile on chumby.com and add the XBMChumby widget (in the “Entertainmnet” category). The configuration widget will prompt for the IP address of your Xbox. Then just start playing some music on the Xbox and when the widget loads on the Chumby it will retrieve the RSS feed from the Xbox and show you the next 5 tracks in the playlist (along with album art for the first track). At the moment the widget only retrieves the RSS feed when it first loads so make sure that it isn’t the only widget in your channel otherwise it will never refresh.