Welcome to Coherence

News

June 19, 2009
Coherence Awarded "Special Jury Award" by 5th Annual Trophées du Libre
May 19, 2009
releasing version 0.2.2 - Let the Sunshine In - of The Inspector
May 12, 2009
release of version 0.6.4 - Pont Mirabeau
April 23, 2009
Coherence had been announced as Finalist in the media category of the Trophées du Libre contest.
The final round is planned to be on June 5 & 6, 2009.
First Coherence/KDE sprint May 9/10 in Paris
February 24, 2009
releasing version 0.2.0 - Good Morning, Starshine - of The Inspector
February 23, 2009
release of version 0.6.2 - Rosenmontag

older news...

What is it?

For Users

As a stand-alone application, Coherence acts as a DLNA/UPnP MediaServer and exports local and remote media files via its backends to other UPnP clients. Used in conjunction with GStreamer or Rhythmbox Coherence can become a controllable DLNA/UPnP MediaRenderer.

Coherence is known to work on various Linux flavors, BSD, (Open)Solaris and Windows.

For Application Developers

Developers get a framework written in Python with an emerging DBus API. This framework is designed to automate all UPnP-related tasks as much as possible and enable applications to participate in digital living networks, primarily the UPnP universe.

The core framework of Coherence provides:

  • an SSDP server
  • an MSEARCH client
  • server and client for HTTP/SOAP requests
  • server and client for Event Subscription and Notification (GENA)
  • A device implementation dock.

UPnP device implementations are pluggable. For instance, we can pick the MediaServer device and plug it into the core. Or attach the MediaRenderer device. Or attach both, or two MediaServers and a ControlPoint - this is the point where one of Coherence's particular features kicks in.

This probably makes more sense if we look at how UPnP devices are implemented within Coherence.

On one side of the device we have the connectors to the core, but on the other side there is a dock for a backend to be plugged in. So a device implementation is generally a simple translation map between the the core and its backend.

As an example, a MediaServer connects to the core via the ContentDirectory and ConnectionManager services and bridges them to a filesystem backend. Or bridges them - let's say - to a less skimpy one, the MediaStore? of a MediaCenter exposing its content in a way already presorted by album, artist, genre,...etc.

More information is available in the Architectural Overview.

Current State

At the moment Coherence is primarily focused on the UPnP A/V devices, but any other UPnP device can be addressed too, such as a Lighting Controls bridge to EIB home-automation.

The core itself is fairly complete and can be used on its own for debugging purposes.

Several MediaServers are implemented, most notably a file system backend. Other MediaServers that connect to Flickr, Last.FM, and Elisa Media Center are implemented as well.

A MediaRenderer with a GStreamer audio backend and the ControlPoint is in its early stages.

Supported Devices

Here is a list of devices which have been reported to work with Coherence. Please keep us informed about your devices.

  • PlayStation 3 (Firmware 2.10 or newer) using Coherence >= 0.5.0
  • TV Acer AT MGW 3705 using Coherence 0.5.2
  • Nokia N800
  • More devices ...

Documentation

For information about using Coherence with(in) your application and writing backends and plugins, visit the DocumentationDepartment and the slowly growing list of SupportedDevices.

There are also some posts about Coherence in my blog, these will sooner or later will get incorporated into this site.

Contact and Discussion

Please add your bug-reports, suggestions, patches or comments to this trac instance.
You need to register first, to reduce spam.

Developers and users usually hang around on IRC: irc://irc.freenode.net/#coherence or irc://irc.freenode.net/#elisa

There are two mailing-list for Coherence:

coherence-announce
only announces about updates and new releases, read-only
coherence-dev
discussions, questions,... about development and usage issues

For searching the history of the coherence-dev mailing list you can use nabble.

Frank Scholz, the lead developer of Coherence, can be reached at coherence@beebits.net.

Download

There is an entry in the CheeseShop enabling you to install and upgrade with easy_install:

  • easy_install Coherence

Binary packages are listed on the packages page.

source tarball:

source checkouts via Subversion are possible too:

  • the 0.6.4 release: svn co https://coherence.beebits.net/svn/tags/Coherence-0.6.4 Coherence
  • current development: svn co https://coherence.beebits.net/svn/trunk/Coherence Coherence

History

Coherence has its roots in the work of

License

Coherence is licensed under the MIT license.

Dependencies

Variety

There are other projects that are similar to Coherence or provide related functions, such as a dedicated UPnP MediaServer implementation. They are listed on the Resources page.

Publicity