UPnP AV Media Server support for VLC player

• Student’s name: Shaleen Shah

• Date: November 5, 2007

• Advisor’s name: Dr. Chung-E-Wang

Prof. Dick Smith

Department of Computer Science

California State University Sacramento

Motivation

• Primary reason: I was highly interested to work for Open Source community.

• I gained interest in the following areas during my studies:Computer Networks and Data StructureProtocol implementation

• UPnP AV media server support for VLC media player satisfies all of the above criteria. So, I found it most suitable project for me.

About: UPnP AV• UPnP stands for Universal Plug and Play.• The goal of UPnP is to simplify the networking of

intelligent devices in homes and businesses. • UPnP is a open architecture based on TCP/IP, UDP,

XML and HTTP• UPnP consists of a set of computer network protocols.• UPnP AV (UPnP Audio and Video) is a group of

standards which is part of UPnP standards.• Some free AV media servers based on UPnP AV:

XBMC for Xbox; Windows Media Connect for windows; TwonkyMedia for Linux, Windows.

About: VideoLan, VLC and VLS• VideoLAN is an Open Source team and a community

that develops and supports video projects.• VideoLan started as a student project at the French

École Centrale Paris but is now a worldwide project with developers from 20 countries.

• VideoLan originally developed two programs VLC (Video Lan Client) and VLS (Video Lan Server). But, most of the features of VLS has been incorporated into VLC. Thus, VLS has been deprecated.

Overview of VLC

• VLC is a highly portable, cross-platform multimedia player.

• VLC supports large number of multimedia formats (Audio and Video)

• VLC supports various streaming protocols. So, VLC can be used as a streaming server in unicast or multicast provided VLC player is located at other side.

Q: Why should I implement UPnP AV media server?

• VLC multimedia player's streaming is compatible with only VLC multimedia player (VLC streaming is based on RTP-RTCP)

• Most of the DigitalHome devices don't understand VLC streaming i.e lack of support for Digital Home devices in VLC streaming protocols.

• UPnP provides the bridge to communicate between VLC and digital home devices.

UPnP Architecture

• UpnP support

VLC

UpnP AVmedia server

Device 1 Device 2

UPnP Software Development Kit (UPnP SDK)

• UPnP SDK is available on the forum http://upnp.sourceforge.net/

• Intel created the first version of the Linux SDK for UPnP Devices. More information regarding Intel involvement in UPnP SDK can be found at http://www.intel.com/cd/ids/developer/asmo-na/eng/downloads/upnp/overview/index.htm

• UPnP AV media server implementation requires following three modules:Content Directory Service (Required)Connection Manager Service (Required)AV Transport Service (Optional)

MY MODULE• My module integrates first two phases of UPnP

AV media server in VLC which are Discovery and Description

• Discovery: It requires to implement Connection Manager Service of UPnP architecture.

• Description: It requires to implement Content Directory Service of UPnP architecture.

• Overall project requires through understanding of data structure knowledge plus knowledge of integrating a protocol.

Future work• The project can go for some special case in

Content directory display (e.g.Search functionality) and GUI development

• Example of special case: How to support TV streaming using AV server?

(Optional)