MediaServer miner for gnome online miners
After a working GOA media server provider I had been working on, its the time to start mining data from the added GOA account. Though media server provides variety of media types, I am currently only considering browsing photos from the media server.
Exported object on the D-Bus by the GOA daemon only provides with the UDN (Unique Device Name) and the DlnaSupported property of the media server. The DlnaSupported property tells if the media server is DLNA certified or not. This can be useful if in future we plan to integrate other types of media servers in GNOME. These two properties are just enough for the miner to start working. The miner fetches the UDN of the added accounts and see if the DMS with UDN is currently online or not. Also depending upon the DlnaSupported property, it will instantiate the server manager accordingly (Eg. DLNA server manager for DLNA devices, some XXX manager for some XXX type of media server etc.). All online media servers are then probed for photos.
The mining task would really have been very easier had all the media servers provide the searchable property on them. But unfortunately, not all the media servers are searchable, you can’t search them by their MIMEType (eg: give me all photos). With all the current DMSes I am playing out with while Rygel supports searching, there are quite few like my android device which prohibits searching at all. For DMSes that do not allow searching for the content, the miner needs to recursively check data in each of the container (directory) for photos.
At the time of writing this post, I have successfully implemented a basic mining for photos on devices that are searchable. You can have a look at the work attached to Bug 728912. I am still finding my way out for efficiently searching for photos in DMSes that do not provide any such searchable property at all or that prohibits searching via MIMEType.
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