MMM-Podcast (or playing a video on command at all) without button?

[SurfingCA]

Hi! I have almost no knowledge of coding, but I’ve been learning a little here and there with this project. I have a small clip that I would like to play on command using MMM-Remote Control. Almost everywhere I’ve turned, I’ve seen people recommending MMM-Podcast but I don’t actually have a physical button to play it with and I don’t want to have my pi trying to run voice command all the time for the rest of forever, especially since I wanted this to be subtle, so I could turn it on without friends noticing. Without the button, I’m not even sure if MMM-Podcast works right now and I don’t know if MMM-Remote Control has the ability to activate MMM-Podcast at all. I did manage to get a module called MMM-htmlvideo to play the test video that it came with, but not mine (I suspect this is because my video is a file on the pi as opposed to a web address) and this module plays the videos once or on loop, and I want it to play on command. Any help would be greatly appreciated! Thank you all so much!

[Anhalter42]

@SurfingCA IIRC MMM-Podcast works together with MMM-Button which enables you to use a hardware button to start playing the video/podcast. So you can either (1) use this OR (2) emulate its behaviour using MMM-RemoteControl.
(1) is properly documented I guess.
For (2) you have to send the exact notification MMM-Button would have sent. By looking through source code, you’ll see that it is BUTTON_PRESSED (with a payload of true, which gets ignored in MMM-Podcast anyway). So, you should be able to use http://ip:8080/remote?action=NOTIFICATION& notification=BUTTON_PRESSED to activate MMM-Podcast to play the video. Note: obviously you have to replace ip with the correct IP and you have to remove the whitespace between & and notification which I had to insert to prevent & and not to get converted to ¬ on this board.