How to Control Dreambox and PlayonHD with your iPhone

When I bought my house, I had everything re-wired. This included the TV cables. We used a slightly more expensive cable that allows me to send extra signals around the house to every television set. This is basically two extra channels that run from my Dreambox satellite receiver and my PlayonHD media player to every television in the house.  Good as that is, I couldn’t change channels upstairs. I had to keep running downstairs to do this. But now that I have an iPhone, I can use apps for changing the channels from anywhere in the house. I just need to be in range of a WiFi access point.

First up is DreamboxRC (top left). If you do a search for “dreambox” you will find others. This one is $1.99 and does the job well. I just have to set up the IP address for my Dreambox and then I can change channels as I like from anywhere in the house. Clicking on the “info” button I can see more information about the program that I am watching. There is also an EPG to tell me what is coming up. With this remote I can also set it to record any program (one time or every episode) and also view programs that I have already recorded.

For the control of my PlayonHD media player, it is possible to use the Ryan Remote (top right) which is available for 99 Cents. With this, you can take complete control of your media player from anywhere in the house as long as you can access the network with WiFi. I can also browse the network to find and play the files that I recorded from the Dreambox. To be honest, I haven’t bought this remote as I use a web interface which is now possible with the latest firmware update. Just type in your browser the IP address of the PlayonHD device and add “:1024″ to the end. You then get a simple remote control which is good enough to use.

There are other apps that you can get that allows you to watch all of the satellite channels (via Dreambox) and stream movies (via PlayonHD) on your iPhone/iPad. So, you can then watch what you like where you like in your house. More about that later. In the meantime, if you have any tips about connecting a Dreambox or PlayonHD to your iPhone then please let us know in the comments below.