[Kde-hardware-devel] What's our UPnP story?

[Sebastian Kügler]

Hi,

For some time, I've been idly wondering what our UPnP story is. I see that we 
have an optional dependency on herqq, but I'm not aware of any active 
development going on there. I never got herqq properly installed so that I was 
able to build these bits, so I wonder in how far this works for others?

I have quite some devices here in my local network, and it seems to be 
gravitating around UPnP + possibly proprietary protocol on top of that for 
media metadata and things that require login or "special vender sauce", such 
as mobile and tablet apps. The scenario of media server, media controller and 
media renderer works well here from my Android device, but I'm not able to 
sensibly use all this goodness that is available in the network here on any of 
my KDE devices.

I'm thinking for of a second screen scenario: being able to have metadata / 
listing of media etc on one device, and play it on another (say, I'm browsing 
my huge collection of kitten movies or tropical island photos from my NAS on a 
Plasma Active tablet, or an Android device, and I want to play them on my 
Plasma Mediacenter which runs on the improv that I've stuck to the back of the 
"dumb TV" with some ductape.

UPnP as a protocol seems to be up to the basics (i.e. play this and that 
stream on that device), but to my knowledge it's really lacking in data 
presentation (fast media search, metadata indexing and propagation across 
devices). Maybe there are other suitable, widely supported standards? Maybe 
KDE Connect can be of help here?

Cheers,
-- 
sebas

http://www.kde.org | http://vizZzion.org | GPG Key ID: 9119 0EF9