Mediacacherd caches media files! Currently audio files are supported.
Lets say you have a fairly large collection of nice losslessly encoded music. You want to copy this collection, or parts of it, to your portable music player. As the space is probably limited on this device, it's time to bring out a good audio compressor. Vorbis in this example.
Encoding hundreds of gigabytes worth of FLAC music takes time. It is a massively parallelizable task, since each track is encoded individually. We should be able to spread it out over all available CPU cores, even if they are located in different machines. For example, in my household there are 14 CPU cores that are somehow connected to power and Ethernet. Let's put all of them to work!
Illustration derived from drawing by Allie Brosh.
You need the Python 3 bindings for GObject introspection libraries. On Debian/Ubuntu this is the package python3-gi. You also need GStreamer 1.0 and its GObject introspection data. I'm not sure which packages are strictly necessary, but it should be a subset of the following so I recommend just installing all of them:
gstreamer1.0-tools
gir1.2-gstreamer-1.0
gir1.2-gst-plugins-base-1.0
gstreamer1.0-plugins-good
gstreamer1.0-plugins-ugly
gstreamer1.0-plugins-bad
gstreamer1.0-libav
The python3-gst-1.0 package is not used.
As these are installed system-wide, make sure to enable global site packages in your Python virtualenv. The server is based on Flask. You can install it in your virtualenv with pip:
$ pip install flask