Author's note: I'm currently collaborating with a friend over at AutisTech.org on finding or creating a video playback solution with very simple remote control for his daughter. This post is based on some early exploration I did toward this. Ultimately, we'd like to have a simplified mobile device interface to XBMC or something similar. If you are interested in contributing your expertise, please check out the projects page over at his website!
Update 1/25/2014: More details on the video player concept have been posted here.
Once again I was looking to do some coding for fun over the weekend. A friend and I had recently discussed ways to control media playback on a Linux-based system from a remote device. Looking for an excuse to practice writing Python code (I come from a Perl background) and to learn Flask (a lightweight in-application webserver for Python), I decided to roll my own simple HTTP interface to control mplayer, a popular, command-line media player for Linux.
Read on for the details of my approach and some mildly-questionable Python code. (If you're looking for more refined implementations of this idea with varying feature sets, check out here and here.)