JJZolx wrote: > Are there inherent limitations to a UPnP controller and player posed by > the API itself? Can a user interface controlling a player that is > connected to a UPnP server be just as rich as one connected to a > Squeezebox Server? Is it possible to implement much of the same > functionality, such as gapless playback, shuffle, repeat, random play, > etc.? > Definitely possible if all parts of the system comes from the same manufacturer. Not likely if different parts of the system comes from different manufacturers, mainly because parts of the UPnP standard is too complex to be implementer/interpreted the same way by everyone.
The best tablet based controller I've seen is Kinsky (by Linn): http://oss.linn.co.uk/trac/wiki/Kinsky There are a lot of others too but many of them are pretty buggy and/or limited. One issue with the UPnP protocol is that it's a bit too generic, it's designed to be able to handle more or less everything, which result in that it's interpreted differently by everyone. Another issue is that the current playlist is managed by the controller which means that it needs to be powered on for the playlist to continue playing the next track, some solve this by putting the playlist in the player device making it impossible to control the player with a generic UPnP controller, other solves it by putting it in the server device. Either way you remove some flexibility since it means that you can't choose devices from different manufacturers the same way. A third issue is that they haven't agreed on a standardized to handle authentication for protected streaming services, like Spotify, so if you have a need for a service like that you pretty much have to get all parts from the same manufacturer for it to work. Putting all this together results in that the overall setup tends to be even more geeky than the Squeezebox setup. UPnP works great in a TV or DVD/Blueray player which naturally is always on when used and is typically controlled via a non UPnP protocol, like a IR remote or a proprietary tablet/smart phone app. JJZolx wrote: > > What about metadata capability? Can a UPnP player have arbitrary > metadata fields such as ALBUMARTIST, COMPILATION, COMPOSER, ARTISTSORT > and others? > As long as only the server part need to know about them there isn't any problem to use them, this would for example be the case for xxxSORT and posibly COMPILATION tags. For the other, the server part can definitely support and expose them, the question is just if the controller is able to display them if it comes from a different manufacturer. However, there is no problem implementing a UPnP server which provides separate browse menus for album artist, artist, composer, conductor, we did an early prototype for this in the SMD project. As long as you have separate menus it's also fairly likely that all controllers are going to be able to browse and show the data. I believe it gets a bit more tricky if you want to show information about a single song and want to display both the composer, album artist, artist and conductor of the track, in this case it depends on that the controller and server interpret it the same and the chance of that happening if the different parts comes from different manufacturers isn't that good. I personally don't think UPnP is the future of whole house audio, I think UPnP plus something else on top of it could be, but not UPnP alone because it leaves too much room for interpretation. The main reason to base something on UPnP is that you want to be able to use different parts from different manufacturers, but everything I've seen with multiple manufacturers have either been geeky, limited or not working reliably. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ erland's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=3124 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=96394 _______________________________________________ plugins mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/plugins
