I would like to build a Spotify Integration for OpenPHT

Dev Community Apps & Creations
1

Hello! I would like to post my thoughts on a Spotify integration. I know there are some old integrations that don’t really work anymore, but to be honest, even if they did work, I don’t think they were taking the right approach.

The main problem is that you need to be running an official Spotify client in order to use “Spotify Connect”. It doesn’t work with libspotify, so that’s a dealbreaker for me. Spotify Connect gives you the ability to control Spotify from your phone or your laptop, so you can start playing on your phone and then “cast” to another device. Without this, your only option is to type in artists or track titles using your TV remote, which is just awful.

So I don’t even really need a full Spotify channel. I’m thinking about building something that integrates OpenPHT with a native Spotify client that is running in the background. I’m already running the Spotify client on my Linux Media PC, and I think it has been working really well. It just gives me the ability to play music on my stereo.

I’ve also written a little script that watches the Plex playback status, and pauses Spotify whenever you start watching something. It’s really easy to pause Spotify on Linux:

dbus-send --print-reply --dest=org.mpris.MediaPlayer2.spotify /org/mpris/MediaPlayer2 org.mpris.MediaPlayer2.Player.Pause

You can also get track information and album art URLs through dbus. I’m sure Mac and Windows aren’t too hard either.

So what I really want is have a little section at the top of the home screen, where I can show the Spotify track details and album art. If you’re not playing anything in OpenPHT, it would be nice to take over the play/pause/prev/next buttons and just forward those to the Spotify client. And to also pause Spotify whenever you start playing anything in OpenPHT.

I would also want to show Spotify status during the screensaver. I’m using the “Library Art” screensaver to show photos. I think I would just want to show a small album art photo, artist, and track title. It would go on the opposite side of the screen from the clock and image filename.

I was wondering if any OpenPHT would be interested in helping with this? I haven’t worked on an OpenPHT plugin before, so I could use some pointers, especially with the GUI stuff.

Cheers

2

Hi @fxnx,

OpenPHT doesn’t have any plugin support really at this time. But in the next major version, there will be plugin support available. I think you’d want to shoot for that version to concentrate your development.

3

An even better solution could be to implement a Spotify channel for PMS, since that would work for all Plex clients rather than just for OpenPHT. And there are plenty of existing PMS channels with open source code available to study for coding ideas.