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

[Àlex Fiestas]

On Thursday 12 December 2013 02:58:52 Sebastian Kügler wrote:
> 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 wasn't a involved in solid when all this happen, but as far as I know the 
story goes like this:
-A KIO is written
-A solid backend is written
-We disable it because we did not have a "Remote" type so we used "External", 
which made the device notifier go loco (any time a window machine will connect 
to the network it will raise).
-The KIO was not ready.
-Months pass without people taking care of this.
-Distribution ships libsolid compiled with UPnP backend
-I see that it has a looot of un-triage crashes
-I sent an email asking if somebody wants to take care of this
-Nothing happens
-I disable the backend by default (so it won't compile even if you have herqq)

Also, Herqq is LGPLv3 (and it was GPLv3 before), which caused issues since 
libsolid is LGPLv2 or greater.

> 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?

We must support UPnP no matter what, of that I have no doubt.
But my personal long term plan is to make KDE Connect do all these things and 
make sure that the experience between KDE Connect devices is excellent.