Chill Remote

I used to watch a lot of content on my monitor, but it is not a smart display and it has no remote. So I would plug in my laptop and watch from there, which was fine until I actually sat down on my bean bag or the couch. From across the room there was no good way to seek, play, or pause, and getting up every time to touch the laptop killed the whole “chill” part.

So I built a little remote for it. Chill Remote is a web app plus a browser extension that talk to each other: I open the web app on my phone, and it tells the extension running in the browser what to do, which then simulates the right clicks and key presses on the page. The result is that my phone becomes a proper remote for whatever is playing, and it works on the sites I actually use like Netflix, Amazon Prime, and YouTube.

It is a small, silly project, but it is one I genuinely used all the time. The fun part was figuring out how to bridge a phone and a desktop browser and make one drive the other reliably.

How you can use it

Run the extension in your browser on the machine playing the video, open the web app on your phone, and pair them. Then you can control playback from wherever you are sitting. The repo has the setup.