booji;154886 Wrote: 
> Am I the only one that thinks like this? I'm sure slim devices missing
> out by not making their product compatable with other software. If the
> squeezebox can be firware upgraded then I will wait for a while (in the
> hope they become UPNP compatable).

This doesn't come up all that often.  SlimServer, despite issues some
users may have with it, is extremely powerful and capable.  It does far
more than UPnP - after all, the Squeezebox display is actually generated
by SlimServer.

As it is now, the Squeezebox is a dumber client than most UPnP clients,
it depends on the server to a much greater extent.  But ironically, its
CPU and firmware resources are often greater than many UPnP clients.

The question isn't can the Squeezebox be made UPnP compliant - it
clearly has the resources and capability of being so, the question is,
can a UPnP server supply what's required to operate a Squeezebox? 
Probably not, it would have to be so specialized, you might as well use
SlimServer.  Not too many UPnP servers are designed to draw their
client's screen!

As funkstar mentions, perhaps some features can be moved into the
Squeezebox itself - this would be a huge task though.  And the
Sqeezebox would not have the power for transcoding, AlienBBC and some
of the more complex plugins.  That's a very important feature of the
product - because all the power is in the server, the player is
extremely flexible and far-reaching changes can be made relatively
easily and quickly.  Most of that would be lost going to UPnP with
SlimServer functionality in the Squeezebox.

However I've seen a brief mention that the Squeezebox firmware is
getting crowded.  So having a firmware that is both SlimServer and UPnP
compliant might not be possible at this point.  You could perhaps have
an either/or.

> Could we have a poll on this subject Forum  ops?

You can create a poll the same way you created this thread.  It's an
interesting idea.

Slim Devices/Logitech makes money off the hardware, not off SlimServer.
They've put a heavy investment into SlimServer over the years, but it's
been all to advance the hardware capabilities.  As I indicated, adding
UPnP support and moving SlimServer functionality to the player might
not be trivial, however, it may allow them to increase sales, which was
the ultimate goal of the Logitech aquisition.

I would personally rather not see this.  It would make the player much
less flexible.  As a lot of SlimServer functionality would be in the
player, SlimServer would become just another UPnP server.  It could
remain open-source but there wouldn't be as much you could do with it,
so development (especially by 3rd parties and the community) might
stagnate.  There'd be only so much you could do before having to go in
and muck about with the firmware, which only a select few Slim Devices
people can do.


-- 
Mark Lanctot
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View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=29706

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