Improved UPnP serving and client

by Alasdair Campbell for XBMC Foundation

Despite it’s age, UPnP-AV is still the de facto standard for multimedia sharing in the home. Hundreds of products throughout millions of homes support UPnP to varying degrees. This propagation of devices represent a largely untapped potential to increase the relevancy of XBMC. Currently, XBMC operates both as a UPnP ‘media server’ and a ‘media renderer/control point’ (client), however it does not fully utilize the protocol to provide as rich as user experience as possible, and some third-party devices are incapable of streaming the content from XBMC altogether. The aim of this project is to extend the existing UPnP handling within the application, enhancing both the underlying code for the ease of future development, increasing the support for existing devices, while making great improvements to the end user’s perceptions as a whole.