IntentBridge

This lets you activate arbitrary Android intents via the web browser!

Problem

I have a movie file, and a subtitle file, and want to present them in a website in such a way that I can use an Android device to view the movie file together with the subtitle. Unfortunately (and rather obviously), this was not possible in a convenient way. You can present a link to the movie file and another link for the subtitle file, but there would be multiple steps required to view them:

1. Download the subtitle file
2. Click on the link to the movie file (a movie player will pop up)
3. Tell the movie player to load the subtitle file downloaded in step (1)

IntentBridge to the rescue!

IntentBridge is an Android app, that captures the URL that you click on, performs magic on the URL and pass the movie file plus the subtitle file to the movie player. The movie player will now play the movie file together with the subtitle!.

Okay it's not really magic. You construct the URL in such a way that it contains both URLs, and IntentBridge splits that URL.

How does this really work?

Here is the structure of the magic URL:

http://phunehehe.github.io/IntentBridge /action/target_uri/extras

• action is the intent action, such as android.intent.action.VIEW.
• target_uri is the URI that is passed to the intent. In our movie example, it's the URL of the movie, URL-encoded.
• extras is the list of "extras" to pass to the intent, in JSON format, URL-encoded.

In our example, extras in its full form is as follow (as per MX Player's API):

[
    {
        "name": "subs",
        "type": "android.net.Uri[]",
        "value": [
            "http://phunehehe.github.io/IntentBridge/demo.srt"
        ]
    }
]

Install MX Player, IntentBridge, use your Android device and click here to convince yourself that it actually works.

So this is a kind of movie player?

Not really, it can be use to trigger any Android intent, but the movie playing part scratches my itch :)