NAME

btavctpd — Media control for Bluetooth devices

SYNOPSIS

DESCRIPTION

The btavctpd daemon can be used to allow local media players to be controlled via the control buttons found on Bluetooth devices such as headsets and speakers.

It can control players either via libplayerctl (available in multimedia/playerctl) or otherwise using xdotool. If using xdotool(1), btavctpd will emit key press events for the X11 keys XF86AudioPlay, XF86AudioPause, XF86AudioNext and XF86AudioPrev. In the latter case the daemon must be launched from within an X11 session.

OPTIONS

-d, --no-daemon

Do not daemonise and don't detach from the controlling terminal.

-p

Use libplayerctl to control the local media player.

-h, --hostname bthostname

Connect to the given Bluetooth address or hostname.

FILES

/etc/bluetooth/hosts

List of Bluetooth hostnames and their addresses

EXAMPLES

Run in the background and connect to a device called “headphones” listed in /etc/bluetooth/hosts using playerctl to control the media players:

$ btavctpd -p -h headphones

DIAGNOSTICS

Errors are logged to syslogd and unless the -d flag is set also to stderr. Syslog output should end up in /var/log/daemon.log.

SEE ALSO

hccontrol(8), hcsecd(8), virtual_oss(1), xdotool(1), playerctl(1)

AUTHORS

Nico Sonack aka. herrhotzenplotz <nsonack@herrhotzenplotz.de>

BUGS

The AVCTP protocol implementation is likely buggy and not strictly compliant to the Bluetooth SIG spec. In case you hit any weirdnesses or detect protocol errors please report them either via E-Mail to me or on Microsoft© GitHub™.

You can use hcidump(1) from the ports tree to record the transactions with the HCI and analyse the traffic in Wireshark:

# rm -f bork.pcap
# hcidump -i ubt0hci -w bork.pcap
# chown user:user bork.pcap
$ wireshark bork.pcap

This is how I dissected the traffic for debugging purposes.