Support for Metadata extraction from audio/video files

[csoni111]

The Problem:

As the cast feature is now functional on both Android and iOS apps. So while casting media content, It's better if we show the currently playing video's cover image (or preview) or audio's album art image. This gets displayed at several places in android/ios (like notification icon, extended controls screen background, mini controller's side icon, on the cast device selection dialog, lock screen background, etc.). Now the problem is that the cast API requires a URL of the image which we do not have.

Solution

An API to fetch the metadata (including Artist, Album, Track title, Genre, Album Artwork, Track number in case of audio file) of the media file and also a unique URL pointing to the cached album art or preview image for the media.

[vishwasmittal]

I can see a /metadata endpoint which provides these details. So I think that the only thing required is the endpoint for album art/preview image right?
@csoni111

[csoni111]

If I am not wrong /metadata endpoint fetches the data from public APIs (like tmdb, omdb etc.) based on the name of the file. It's not much efficient.
Whereas in this issue I meant to extract data from the file itself (using ID3 tags etc.). This is currently done by the Android/iOS apps themselves which is a bad practice. It's slower and fetches a lot of data, also it is probably limited to mp3 files.
So we need a way to process this information on the server, store it and return it in the form of an API.

[vishwasmittal]

Okay, that makes sense.

[vishwasmittal]

https://github.com/dhowden/tag this is the one I think can work for this.

[csoni111]

I will suggest before getting into the coding part, prepare a High-level design document for this feature, listing out what all data can be extracted from which all types of files, how will that data be stored (in DB and/or file system), when will this data be fetched/refreshed, and then finally how will that data be presented in the form of an API. Feel free to include any other details you feel relevant.

[vishwasmittal]

Okay, sure

[orangehaired]

Hi @vishwasmittal, @csoni111 , I want to be a GSOC participant in your project this year. If this task is not done, I do, please can you assign this task to me, I would like to work on it. Pull request was sent but not processed so i wanted to confirm.