GUPnP: achievements and way forward

As most of you probably know already, GUPnP is now officially part of Maemo and therefore future internet tablets. This is a major milestone and gives a big boost to my motivation to continue my UPnP adventure. Although I try to put as much of the bits and peaces of spare time i get from my job into UPnP work and I am pretty sure the Intel (former OH) will continue their work as well, we could certainly use more hands to accelerate the development.

If you want to help, here is a short list of TODOs that you might want to have a look at and decide if you could help on any of these:

• Bindings: Although the more bindings we have the more worlds we can conquer but what we definitely need is bindings for most popular languages in GNOME/Maemo world, namely C#/mono, Java and Python. If you are interested in helping with this, I strongly suggest you take the g-i-r route. Also if you are only interested in C# bindings, I suggest you talk to Jerome Halton who already have a half-baked solution.


• Integration: GUPnP can't possibly become the standard UPnP framework of the GNOME world until we have:
  
  
  
  • plugins for Totem, Rhythmbox and Banshee enabling these apps to browse and search contents on UPnP MediaServer (MS), export playback control on the UPnP network by implementing a MediaRenderer (MR) and to redirect playback of contents to other MRs.
    
    You might notice that I didn't mention sharing of contents on the network, the reason for which is that I believe (and Jorn agrees) that that should be the responsibility of a dedicated MS (gupnp-media-server) as part of the desktop session. Having a dedicated MR OTOH hardly makes any sense.
  
  
  
  • GVFS backend for UPnP, allowing the GIO world to browse, copy and move contents to/from UPnP MS as if it was just a local filesystem.
  
  
  
  • PulseAudio integration: Wouldn't it be nice if I could redirect all audio output of my laptop/internet tablet to my cool UPnP-enabled speakers or my desktop machine running Totem, Rhythmbox, Banshee or better yet PulseAudio itself (which would mean p-a implements both an MR and an MR control point (CP)? This is actually part of Lennart's great plan to conquer the world so I thought I mention it here in case someone does it before Lennart gets the time to do it himself.
  
  
  
  
  
  

UPDATE: Forgot to mention a very imporant task: Porting to platforms other than Linux. We mostly use glib, libxml2 and libsoup so this shouldn't be a huge task. The only platform-specific code in the whole stack that I know of is the networking bits.