Hfrhyu

Can AIS marine traffic live vessel data be integrated into QGIS?

I understand this could be possible using an OpenCPN plugin and Grass.

Sorry for this late answer but want to share this if you still need it. I used Vesselfinder, fairly the same to MarineTraffic, and I think I accomplished what you are trying to achieve.

I used a python script (with psycopg2 extension) that received the information via an API from Vesselfinder. The script saved the data in a PostgreSQL database (with PostGIS extension) and in QGIS a PostgreSQL/PostGIS database is accessible via the database manager. Every time the script runs (i used a Loop Bat. file, to let it run every 5 min) the data is updated en immediately visible in QGIS.

this is the python code to get data and store it in a db.

 # Import libraries
 import requests
 import pprint
 import json
 import sys
 import psycopg2
 import datetime

 # Make database connection
 conn = psycopg2.connect("dbname=YOURDBNAME user=YOURUSERNAME password=YOURPASSWORD")

 # Get cursor
 cur = conn.cursor()

 # Define headers
 headers = 'User-Agent': 'Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.11 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/23.0.1271.64 Safari/537.11',
 'Accept': 'text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8',
 'Accept-Charset': 'ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.3',
 'Accept-Encoding': 'none',
 'Accept-Language': 'en-US,en;q=0.8',
 'Connection': 'keep-alive'

 # Build URL
 url = 'YOUR VESSELFINDER/MARINETRAFFIC API URL

 # Execute HTTP request
 print('Get vessel positions from ' + str(url))
 response = requests.get(url, headers=headers)

 # Get result and store in database (point in 4326, convert date 2019-02-01 06:29:43 UTC)
 # Update scheepstrack
 if response.status_code == 200 :
 print ('Request OK')
 if len(response.json()) > 0 :
 i = 0
 while i < len(response.json()):
 YOURCOLLUMNAME = str(response.json()[i]['AIS']['NAME'])
 YOURCOLLUMNAME = int(response.json()[i]['AIS']['MMSI'])
 YOURCOLLUMNAME = float(response.json()[i]['AIS']['LATITUDE'])
 YOURCOLLUMNAME = float(response.json()[i]['AIS']['LONGITUDE'])
 YOURCOLLUMNAME = datetime.datetime.strptime(str(response.json()[i]['AIS']['TIMESTAMP'][:-4]), '%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S')

# Insert new position
 insert_stmt = 'insert into YOURDBNAME ( YOURCOLLUMNAME, YOURCOLLUMNAME, "YOURCOLLUMNAME", "YOURCOLLUMNAME" ) values ( %s, %s, ST_SetSRID(ST_MakePoint(%s, %s),4326), %s )' 
 cur.execute ( insert_stmt, ( YOURCOLLUMNAME, YOURCOLLUMNAME, YOURCOLLUMNAME, YOURCOLLUMNAME, YOURCOLLUMNAME ) )

This will create a real-time feed of you vessel(s)
Hope this is still to some use to you or somebody else that reads this.