Skip to content

profusion/lightmediascanner

Repository files navigation

                         LIGHT MEDIA SCANNER
                         ===================

Lightweight media scanner meant to be used in not-so-powerful devices,
like embedded systems or old machines.

Provides an optimized way to recursively scan directories, handling
the parser in a child process, avoiding breaks of the main process
when parsers break (quite common with such bad libs and tags). One can
opt to use the single process version, but be aware that if something
bad happens during parsing, your application will suffer.

Parsers are plugins in the form of shared objects, so it's easy to add
new without having to recompile the scanner.

The scanner will use SQLite3 to store file-mtime association, avoiding
parsing files that are already up-to-date. This SQLite connection and
the file id within the master table 'files' are handled to plugins for
relationship with other tables.


DAEMON
~~~~~~

LMS provides `lightmediascannerd', a D-Bus daemon that uses the library
and provides a common use case in a centralized way. It will scan
directories based on some categories (defaults to FreeDesktop.Org/XDG
directories specification, but can be manually specified in the
command line), manages a DataBase WriteLock (remember SQLite3 will
produce annoying 'database is locked' errors if writes are done by one
process while another is using it) and information of database changes
through properties.

Service Information:
 * Well Known Name: org.lightmediascanner
 * Path: /org/lightmediascanner/Scanner1
 * Interfaces: org.lightmediascanner.Scanner1, org.freedesktop.DBus.Properties,
   org.freedesktop.DBus.Introspectable

There is a tool `lightmediascannerctl' to print server status, monitor
properties (useful to see WriteLocked, IsScanning and UpdateID),
request write lock or request scan.

Both tools are written using glib and it's gio/gdbus, so they depend
on these libraries during both compile and runtime.

NOTE:

   If you're installing to custom directories (~/usr, /opt, etc) make
   sure the service file is installed in a directory known to
   dbus-daemon, usually /usr/share/dbus-1/services or
   ~/.local/share/dbus-1/services. Example:

      ./configure \
          --prefix=$HOME/lms \
          --enable-daemon \
          --with-dbus-services=$HOME/.local/share/dbus-1/services