Remotely control an xorg session [duplicate]

Question

Possible Duplicate:
Open a window on a remote X display (why “Cannot open display”)?

I have a computer running debian, connected to my TV, running an xorg session. What I want to do is ssh into that machine and start an application that will also display on that machine. For example, I want to be able to ssh to it from my laptop and start mplayer on the host, playing a file on the host and showing it on the TV. Is this possible? I have a feeling it should be (relatively) trivial, but I just can't seem to figure it out.

Just to clarify, simply running

$ ssh -X host
$ mplayer movie.avi &

won't cut it, because it will start displaying on my laptop's display.

Answer 1

If you know what $DISPLAY your ssh host's X server is using, e.g. :0.0, the following works for me:

ssh host
export DISPLAY=:0.0

Now you can run any graphical app of your choice on your host. You won't be able to see or control the graphical aspects on/from your laptop, of course.

Answer 2

Another tip to place the program in background and detached from the ssh session:

ssh host '(DISPLAY=:0.0 mplayer movie.avi >/dev/null </dev/null 2>&1  &)'