Coder's Log

For the past few weeks I have been cleaning-up and lately re-designing the source code. I am mostly finished with that and I can hopefully focus mostly on functional features piled in my todo now. The biggest change has been that plugins are now loaded into separate Media Servers and allowed to implement all kinds of resources (currently only service implementation is possible) instead of just providing a Media Provider interface. I decided to make it so when I realized that some plugins will need to implement additional services. For example a DVB plugin will want to implement a UPnP ScheduledRecording service rather than just exporting the channels. On a side-note, our brave user (and now a contributor) Florian Steinel has got Rygel working with his PS3 already. According to him all his audio and image files are discovered and played/rendered without any problems but not all of his video files. Yes, there is still room for improvements but I was expecting quite a lot of work on mak

On last friday evening, while thinking about security and UPnP, I realized adding security might not be as hard as one might think. If HTTPS is used instead of HTTP together with authentication, Your neighbor should no longer be able to play his p0rn on your Media Renderer once he/she breaks into your wireless network. Giving it more thought, I then realized it might not be so hard to add this support into GUPnP and I was correct. After a few hours of reading libsoup docs and hacking around this weekend, I managed to add support for HTTPS in GUPnP. Adding authorization doesn't need any changes in GUPnP since we expose both SoupSession and SoupServer so applications can very easily add that there. Also no changes were required in GUPnP for the control points to be able to deal with devices/services using HTTPS instead of HTTP, thanks to libsoup. Here is a bug that you can follow if you are interested in this topic. WARNING : Use of HTTPS and/or authentication is not described in an

I am pleased to announce that gupnp-media-server project has been moved to GNOME SVN under the new name, Rygel . Currently it's a basic implementation on top of GUPnP and Tracker but I'll be putting a lot of time and love staring from next week to turn it into a very great project. Special emphases will be put into making it fit the UPnP needs of GNOME. This would be a very good time to convince me to implement all the features you would want to see in a UPnP Media Server so I can add them to my TODO file. :) UPDATE : While updating the jhbuild moduleset, I found out that rygel isn't buildable with latest vala/bindings. I'll try to correct the issue(s) tommorrow so don't panic if it doesn't build for you. It's just the demo effect. :)

Jussi recently commited some major changes to Ross ' gupnp-binding-tool and one of the new features is support for server-side bindings. This makes writing UPnP implementations in C even more easier. So laziness is becoming less and less of an excuse to not write UPnP stuff. :) Here is a nice document with a nice explanation of how to use it.

Claudio has bad memory so here is my feelings about both of these places in my own words: Meritähti : I really like that place, nice food in a very affordable price. Also it is very near to our office, which makes it the first choice to go to for a meal before we hit another bar for good beers. However, it is most definitely not the best restaurants or bar in Helsinki. Not even one of the best ones. There are lots of very excellent restaurants in the city but of course they charge a lot more. Molly Malone's : That is one of the best bars in Helsinki, lots of nice beers, nice friendly atmosphere and live concert every evening. BTW, Bastien just committed my patch to nautilus-sendto trunk that adds support for sending files to UPnP Media Servers. I've only tested in against Nokia N81 and Media Server provided by Intel tools for UPnP but it should work for most of the Media Servers that support uploading.

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 solu

Many thanks to Olivier Crête , we now have a nice small library for firing holes through firewalls using a part of UPnP IGD API. This library also provides a convenient way to do all that without having to use a gmainloop. While Olivier will most probably use it in his farsight2 , I am sure this will be useful for other projects (I did not say Ekiga :)) as well.