Gesture control & other tablet accessibility tweaks, media renderer

kieppie

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I've dug out an old cr@ppy x86 tablet (Dell Venue Pro 11) and loaded KDE neon to serve as a Jukebox/presenter on my porch when having friends over.
I was using a RasPi before, but this is marginally better.

I'm really not expecting much from this device, and it certainly delivers.

The integrated touch screen was probably the biggest reason, but other issues occurred to me that I've not found good/great solutions for.

I'd like to minimise the need to actually get up touch the device to interact, so these seem to be mostly Accessibility functions I would expect to be easily available to the disabled community - something I'm heading towards with age myself.

Questions such as:
  • are there other means of input or interface-control?
    • i.e. can I use the webcam to read simple gestures, such as (MPRIS/DBUS) play/pause, stop, next, volume up/down, etc. define $arbitrary action
    • voice control?
  • I've (kinda) managed to get it the act as a bluetooth speaker/a2dp-sink, but controlling playback does not work as well as expected
  • Are there any other stable ways I can use it as other media renderers, so that guest on my guest wifi can simply send to it - I've not found any myself
    • chromecast
    • miracast
    • airplay
    • (DLNA is OK)
I recognise these seem like 2 different topics, but they're not as widely separated as one might think, as it speaks to a more intuitive, human-friendly ways of interacting with tech-ubiquity rather than needing deep expertise for simple tasks.
 


Maybe, the problem is what you decided to use; KDE Neon. You probably have your reasons to do so, but there are a few systems out there that might be more suitable for the task. Here are a few:
https://distrowatch.com/search.php?category=Multimedia#simple
From that list, I think LibreELEC might be worth a try
"just enough OS" to run the Kodi media centre. LibreELEC is a Linux distribution built to run Kodi on current and popular hardware. The project is an evolution of the OpenELEC project. LibreELEC software will be familiar to OpenELEC users. The distribution runs on x86 desktop computers, Raspberry Pi devices and ODroid and WeTek computers
Also, I've used volumio, tho my setup was very different from yours(run from a VM). https://volumio.com/en/get-started/
Just noticed they've released a new version, might just download and play again with it. :)
 
Maybe, the problem is what you decided to use; KDE Neon. You probably have your reasons to do so,
The principal reason is that KDE/Plasma is the probably the least fiddly & intuitive interface for a touchscreen device - i.e. think a layman wasted on a Saturday night trying to pick tunes on a jukebox, or a visiting layman wanting to pop their presentation on-screen.

I have Kodi loaded for the reason stated & have rolled with LibreELEC on RPi's as appliance devices to start off with - LibreELEC is essentially a "baked" stack, so getting under the hood to implement additional functionality is non-trivial.

Implementing DLNA & AirPlay (audio) can be achieved through other means too (as background daemons), but MiraCast & Chromecast are effectively a bust - I've not found a good, stable renderer implementation; most of the reason being around DRM/licencing issues, even though I do have headroom on the tablet to run them in a Chrome/Chromium npm/web-app, but have not had much luck.

To address this specific use-case need, I'm OK with standing up something like AirServer in a container.
I've even hoped to repurpose an old Android mobile with a skinny ROM to get me there, but this all gets incredibly fiddly again.
 

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