Content:
Welcome to Coherence
News
- June 30, 2008
- release of version 0.5.8 - Trix and Flix
- June 16, 2008
- the Totem DLNA/UPnP client plugin
- April 30, 2008
- release of version 0.5.6 - Walpurgisnacht
- April 1, 2008
- release of version 0.5.4 - Fools Garden
What is it?
Coherence addresses different needs:
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.
And together with GStreamer or Rhythmbox it forms a controllable DLNA/UPnP MediaRenderer.
It is known to work on various Linux flavors, BSD and Windows.
For Application Developers
Developers get a framework written in Python, with an emerging DBus API, enabling their application to participate in digital living networks, at the moment primarily the UPnP universe.
Its objective and demand is to relieve your application from all the membership/the UPnP related tasks as much as possible.
The core of Coherence provides a (hopefully complete) implementation of
- a SSDP server,
- a MSEARCH client,
- server and client for HTTP/SOAP requests, and
- server and client for Event Subscription and Notification (GENA).
UPnP device implementations can be grouped around the core - in such a way that we can pick for instance 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 Coherences' 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 most of the time merely some sort of a 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 plain and simple 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.
Read more about this in the ArchitecturalOverview.
Current State
At the moment Coherence is pretty much focused on the UPnP A/V devices, but any other UPnP device can be addressed too, especially a Lighting Controls bridge to EIB home-automation is already arising.
The core itself seems to be complete and can even be used solely on its own for e.g. SSDP debugging.
Several MediaServers are implemented, most notable one with a file system backend, a second that connects to Flickr and last, but not least one for the Elisa Media Center.
Then we have 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.
Or check and extend 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, as this will help us to reduce a little bit the amount of spam here.
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
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 0.5.8 release: svn co https://coherence.beebits.net/svn/tags/Coherence-0.5.8 Coherence
- current development: svn co https://coherence.beebits.net/svn/trunk 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
Licence
Coherence is licensed under the MIT license.
Dependencies
- Coherence in written in Python, and currently tested against version 2.4 and 2.5
- 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)
Variety
There are quite some other projects that are similar to Coherence or provide related functions, like e.g. a dedicated UPnP MediaServer implementation. They are listed on the Resources page.
