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Hi all,

I'm brand new to the forums, so I apologize if I have posted in the wrong area. I did search around a bit, and found some useful materials, but was unable to find exactly what I was looking for.

I am looking for a completely interaction-free (at least client-side) XBMC client for a kitchen computer. I know that XBMC has a built-in UPnP server and client, but I don't think there is a way to have this work without any client-side interaction.

A little bit of back story may be helpful to illustrate my need. A few years back I was enjoying a nice cup of coffee, when I accidentally upended it and doused my laptop keyboard. I managed to rip out the power cord and battery and flip the laptop upside down very quickly, but the keyboard no longer worked after letting it dry out for a few days. I re-purposed the laptop as a web-server for a few years, but have recently upgraded and put the laptop in storage. After reading an article about turning an old laptop into a functioning kitchen PC, I decided to do so myself. I successfully reversed the monitor and removed the non-functioning keyboard, and have been working on a way to securely mount it to my wall (metal coat hangers Big Grin).

In the past few days, I have been working on a local website that (when finished) will auto-refresh with a news ticker, my GCal agenda, the weather, and a few other things so I can stay up to speed while cooking and doing the dishes in the mornings and evenings. While working on this, I realized I may be able to have XBMC running on my laptop (as it does happen to have some similar features) so that when I play a video on my XBMC HTPC, it will stream to my kitchen PC if I tell it to do so.

I have been able to do something similar with iTunes (music) and my iPod + YouTube (video) in combination with AirTunes, but I haven't found much in terms of functionality to stream from one XBMC instance to another XBMC instance, much less without any user interaction on the client side.

So, my question for you fellow forum-members is whether anything like this already exists? If not, I would be very willing to help develop or lead development on a plugin to offer XBMC users with the ability to have a dynamic info page (with widgets for news, weather, calendar, etc.) which will be interrupted with streaming video if another XBMC instance on the network were to select it as an output.

Thanks to all the developers for such an amazing product, and thank you to all the users for using it!
I know this isn't what you're looking for but if you can get xbmc up and running and the laptop has wifi everything else could be done from a smart phone or something of the like.
Thanks for the suggestion. That's how I usually run my main XBMC instance, and it works wonders. I was considering setting up an rsync cron to doing exactly that, but I think I'll try my hand at writing a plugin or even a simple UPnP client to do what I'm thinking. XBMC runs a little slow on my laptop, so I'm beginning to think that another option would be a better solution.
attach a remote control Wink