Content:
Welcome to Coherence
News
- 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.
- February 24, 2009
- releasing version 0.2.0 - Good Morning, Starshine - of The Inspector
- February 23, 2009
- release of version 0.6.2 - Rosenmontag
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
- Tim Potter who started everything and set the code lose,
- John-Mark Gurney who continued it with the MediaServer PyMeds
- and Fluendo who added a first ContentDirectory client for Elisa
License
Coherence is licensed under the MIT license.
Dependencies
- Coherence in written in Python, and currently tested against version 2.4 and 2.5
- depends on setuptools for the installation process and plugin management
- profits from the excellent event-driven networking framework Twisted
- needs ElementTree for its XML processing (included in Python 2.5)
- uses Louie for signal dispatching (included inside Coherence beginning with 0.5.8)
- ConfigObj (optional with version 0.5, due to the new XML configuration file format)
- Divmods Nevow (optional, for all the WebUI html, together with Athena for the AJAX bells and whistles)
- ctypes (optional, included in Python 2.5, for the MediaServer file system backend)
- GStreamer (optional, for the MediaRenderer backend)
- [http://alastairs-place.net/netifaces netifaces (optional,to handle on Windows OS the detection of the own IP)
- Mechanize (optional, for the account authentication in the Flickr MediaServer backend)
- Google Data APIs Python Client Library (optional, for the YouTube MediaServer backend)
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.
