New feature media to simplify handling of media in Openhab

[lo92fr]

Hello,

The idea behing this is to try to unify and simplify media handling in Openhab between differents addons.
We already have in openhab today:

• A PlayerItem that enable to controls a player expose by an addons.
• An audio package that give some level of abstraction on Audio Input and Output source, enable recording and playback to different device.

That would be great is to have a new media package that will abstract the Media calalog, enable to browse this catalog in unify way, and handle the playback through the differents addons.

Notes that there is already some support for this today, but handle separatly in each addons:

• UPNPControl addon is able to browse media collection using a text input that is populated with song from the media library : this work, but very hard to use because of poor UI.

• Spotify addon is able to show playlist, and start playback of them. It use like UPNP a text box populated with playlist.

What is done today:

• Add a core package org.openhab.core.media that implements base interface, and enable each addon to register to expose it media collections to a central mediaRegistry.

• Same package expose a Servlet that enable browsing of this mediaRegistry.

• Add a package org.openhab.core.io.rest.media that expose the results on the reset layer.

• Add some pages in UI : pages/media.vue and pages/media-popup.vue that enables browsing of the mediaRegistry.

• Modify Spotify and UPNPControl addons to handle this new media Stuff.

• Some modification on PlayerItem control to launch the media-popup to enable the browsing, and send back the result on the PlayerItem channel, that will enable to start playback through the respective addons.

How it currently locks:

On the mediaPlayer, a new Icons allow to launch the popup.

Popup will display the different MediaSource, so you can browse down your media collection:

When you go down to Track levels, it will show you a screen displaying the parent Album / Playlist, and all the tracks inside, with A global Play button, and the possibility to click on each track to play them individually.

What is not working / will need to be done:
A lot of thing, this is very preliminar version.
So I will not do the list tonight.
The idea is just to open the discussion to see if it's a good idea or not.

The Pull-request involved:
#4709
openhab/openhab-addons#18501
openhab/openhab-webui#3140

[openhab-bot]

This issue has been mentioned on openHAB Community. There might be relevant details there:

https://community.openhab.org/t/ideas-and-discussion-what-features-do-you-want-in-openhab-5-0/160573/709

[digitaldan]

Wow, thats a pretty great feature!

[florian-h05]

I will join Dan here, amazing feature!
Looking forward to review your UI PR.

[lo92fr]

Hello @ALL,

@florian-h05, @digitaldan, @lsiepel,

I would apreciate if someone with more experience in core that me can give comments on this first version.
Especially, about the PlayerItem modifications.

I finally decide to drop my new BrowerMediaItem implementation, and modify the existing PlayerItem.
I introduce a new MediaType accepted command on it.
The idea is that this MediaType command would be use to play / queue an album / track / artist to play on the PlayerItem.

The MediaType is a complex type compose of:

• The type of command : PLAY/QUEUE (for now).
• A parameter (that id the id/path of entry to play).

This command would be relay from core to addons, and addons would have to implement if to handle the play/queue request.
I've currently test this approach with spotify and upnp addons, and it seems to work (minor some obvious bugs to handle).

Laurent

[mlobstein]

Can you share your build/zip of the openhab folder with these new features included? I would like to start working on adding media handling to some of my bindings.