boxee + Asterisk = Caller ID Fun!

Boxee showing caller id from Asterisk
Boxee showing caller id from Asterisk

While browsing around the PBX In A Flash forums I came across a post about getting incoming call notifications on XBMC and immediately thought this would be great with boxee as well seen as we use that every now and then on our Apple TV. The setup was a little bit on the painful side just trying to figure out how to make the “KaiToast” display how I wanted. Out of the box it works great on XBMC, but needs some tweaking to make it work on boxee.

Check out the How-To after the break!

To install you will need to modify a settings file in the boxee skin and also add a notification section to your dialplan on Asterisk.

To get to the boxee skin directory select the boxee app (in OSX, Windows will be somewhat the same) and right click to select “Show Package Contents“. Browse to the skin by going through Contents -> Resources -> Boxee -> skin -> Boxee Skin NG. From here we will want to place the phone.png image into the media folder that you can download below. Next open up the 720p folder and replace the DialogKaiToast.xml with the one attached to this post.

phone

dialogkaitoast

Finally, you will need to trigger the notification from Asterisk somehow. I won’t go into much details as to how to do that specifically as everyone is different. I chose to modify my extensions_custom.conf as the following:

[from-pstn-custom]
include => notify-systems

[notify-systems]
exten => _X.,1,NoOp(Notifying Systems of new call)
exten => _X.,2,System(wget “http://:/xbmcCmds/xbmcHttp?command=ExecBuiltInparameter=XBMC.Notification(%2C${CALLERID(name)}%20<${CALLERID(number)}>%2C15000%2Cphone.png)”)

Now if AppleTV would support Growl so I could get notifications while running the plain AppleTV system I would be even happier, but this will do for now.

2 Comments

  1. altsysrq August 6, 2011 at 8:01 am

    Did you put in the IP name of the Boxee system and port number in the following line?
    exten => _X.,2,System(wget “http://:/xbmcCmds/xbmcHttp?

    What would the port number be?

    Thank you for writing a truly awesome article!

    1. blake August 16, 2011 at 8:57 pm

      Yes the IP goes in there as well as the port, the port is whatever you set the webserver to be running on via the network settings. Typically 8080 or 8888 I think is what Boxee defaults to. I haven’t used it in awhile, been looking at switching to XBMC which is pretty much the same.

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