Netzflocken

As a follow-up to my last post about the GStreamer backend for Coherence I’m happy to announce now the Coherence Flickr UPnP A/V MediaServer backend.

What does it do:

1. it connects to Flickr via the Flickr API and enquires a list of interesting photos for the most recent day
2. it provides that list via the ContentDirectory service to other UPnP A/V enabled devices

So if you have such a multi-functional home-automation touch-panel like mine or one of these tvs with a build-in UPnP A/V client you can now enjoy an ever changing stream of photos coming to your living room.

Of course there will be Flickr enabled picture frames popping up from every manufacturer climbing on the bandwagon - which will definitly have their right to exist, especially if they are used in a isolated environment - but if you are in a connected home it sounds unreasonable to supply configuration to every device all over the place.

Hence the charm of these few lines of Python code lies in its possibility to make Coherence the one-stop-shopping media gateway.

I’ll add a few more features over the next days:

• enquire user, group or tag based photo lists
• optionally only show photos in landscape format
• define picture quality to download
• make the number of photos returned configurable, currently it is limited to 100
• recheck with the Flickr service every e.g. 180 minutes and fetch new photo urls
• maybe act as a proxy to Flickr for devices which are not able to connect to something outside the home lan

And something I would like to add too, but this will take some more time, is a mapping between the UPnP ContentDirectory ImportResource() and CreateObject()/MoveObject()/… actions to the Flickr upload API.