dhleong / shougun

Take command of your media

shougun

Take command of your media

What?

shougun is a programmable, extensible, embeddable, media management framework. That's a lot of adjectives, but it's intended for a lot of uses.

My primary use is integration with a voice assistant and a Chromecast, which looks like this:

// ShougunBuilder is a convenient, typesafe, fluent interface for building a
// Shougun instance with whatever features you desire.
const shougun = await ShougunBuilder.create()

    // play back on a specific chromecast device
    .playOnNamedChromecast("Family Room TV")

    // call this multiple times to scan multiple local folders
    .scanFolder("~/Movies")

    // adds support for querying configured Babbling apps and considering those
    // results in findMedia
    .includeBabblingMedia()

    // track episode watch progress in a sqlite db
    .trackInSqlite("shougun.db")

    // use a phonetic matcher for queries, suitable for use with voice assistants
    .matchByPhonetics()

    // allow Shougun to keep the Node process alive; since this is for
    // a long-running server, we ought to do this since it enables various
    // internal optimizations
    .allowProcessKeepalive()

    // construct the instance
    .build();

onPlaybackRequest(async (query: string) => {

    // find the best match to the query from all configured sources
    const found = await shougun.findMedia(query);
    if (!found) {
        throw new Error("no match");
    }

    // play the found media on the configured output surface (a Chromecast).
    // if `found` appears to be a TV series, Shougun will automatically resume
    // wherever you left off
    console.log("Playing", found);
    await shougun.play(found);
});

shougun's Issues

Add mechanism for suggesting titles to watch / browsing recently watched

Most of this work will be in the APIs that we expose (ideally integrating with babbling) but we could also potentially do something fun with shougun-player here

Consider more sophisticated transcodability checks and transcode auto-config

This project seems to think that the mkv container format is actually supported, so in such a case we would need to check the actual codecs. We ought to be able to query the Chromecast itself for its type, at least, which would let us know which codecs it supports. In some cases, we may be able to passthrough one of the tracks when transcoding (eg -vcodec copy) instead of necessarily having to transcode both tracks, which could speed things along and reduce instances of buffering on files that are particularly high-quality, for example.

Consider custom chromecast app to support time skip with transcoded video

Instead of #4

Prime: IDs returned for "recents" don't match those in search results

This means attempting to send this item directly back as a playback request fails, because the IDs don't match.

Consider casting transcoded media as LIVE

Might make the Chromecast treat it nicer, with respect to inability to skip forward in time, for example.

Support queueing

Handle numbers in titles for phonetic matcher

Use some sort of file fingerprinting/hashing to enable series continuation without the full library

If we can find a fast enough fingerprint method, we ought to be able to compare fingerprints in order to figure out which files we have on disk relative to the most-recently-watched

Consider typesafe Builder interfaces

This could give users compile-time checks to guarantee they've configured all the necessary things before they can call .build(), hiding optional configuration like .matchWith or .enableRemote() until all the required components (tracker, discovery, player) are configured.

Support reporting errors on the Chromecast (if configured)