Skip to content

Home

Jump to bottom Edit New page
Gustavo Sverzut Barbieri edited this page Dec 11, 2013 · 4 revisions

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 User 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, IsScanningandUpdateID`), 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

Recommended Usages

Add a custom footer
Add a custom sidebar
Clone this wiki locally