[Python]Kiosk-type application

Help and Support
1

Hey guys,

I’m developing a sort of kiosk that uses a Raspberry Pi and will have videos playing constantly. I’m looking for a way to control playback and see what’s currently playing with Python.

Searching around the forums, it looks like I should be looking into the XBMC documentation, but I haven’t been able to get very far. I used pip to install xbmc-client but that search turned out to be fruitless. Threads like this one lead me to believe I’m in the right direction.

Here’s my question: How do I utilize the existing code library for interfacing with XBMC/Kodi with Python on OSMC?

2

Kodi has a well defined JSON-RPC API. You should use that. We already include kodi-send and it is in the default path. This will provide you with a wealth of functionality.

3

Thank you for your quick reply. After finding some examples of JSON-RPC, it definitely seems like the direction I want to go. The only problem is, when I run some basic commands, I keep getting this error returned:

requests.exceptions.ConnectionError: ('Connection aborted.', error(111, 'Connection refused'))

The kodi-send command works flawlessly, but I need to be able to get information back from Kodi. Is there a setting I need to change in OSMC to enable this?

4

Make sure you have enabled ‘Allow other systems to control this…’

5

Thank you for your help. For anyone else with this problem, here are the steps I did to fix the issue:

I was working on getting this example working. In order to fix the “Connection refused” problem, I enabled (white box instead of grey) the following settings in OSMC:

  • Settings/Services/Web server/Allow remote control via HTTP
  • Settings/Services/Remote Control/Allow remote control by programs on this system
  • Settings/Services/Remote Control/Allow remote control by programs on other systems