imsamuka / mpd-stream-proxy

A (insecure?) proxy for MPD to listen (youtube) streams with artwork

mpd-stream-proxy

A (insecure?) proxy for MPD to listen (youtube) streams with artwork. It depends on yt-dlp.

This is in a very Beta stage, and i have no interest in continuing it. Fell free to send Issues, PRs or fork the project, if you want to support it.

Quickstart

1. Install rust and yt-dlp.
2. Run the proxy. Example with RUST_LOG=DEBUG cargo run. Use INFO for a more quiet output.
3. Add a entry in the MPD queue.

# Assuming the MPD server is running in the same machine as the proxy
# Also, the trailing '/' is very important, don't forget it
mpc insert 'http://localhost:4000/https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ/'

4. Profit.

How it works

When MPD tries to access the HTTP path /<link>/, the program will ask yt-dlp for the video information, mainly it's stream and thumbnail links. It will store this information in a cache and open a connection to the stream, and pass the connection to MPD. Then MPD can listen to it and gather any other information, like metadata, if possible.

When MPD tries to access the HTTP path /<link>/cover.jpg (or other extensions), then the proxy will open a connection to the thumbnail link, and pass that connection to MPD. So a MPD client can gather the image and display it.

The trailing / is very important, because without it, MPD will ask /cover.jpg instead of /<link>/cover.jpg. It's still safe because the program can recognize this and ignore the request, issuing a warning.

TODOs and Problems

• The image will only be gathered if the MPD client calls albumart. readpicture could possibly work but it's harder to set up, as we need to edit the song binary stream. For more information read the MPD protocol.

• We can possibly edit the song binary stream and append ID3 tags to support more extensible music metadata, so the clients can show the music title and author instead of a long crypt URL.