DAAP vs UPnP MediaServer

While I believe that Lennart's work on free implementation of Apple protocols is very important for the wide-spread acceptance of free software, I fail to see any fact(s) that could support his claims like "I believe that DAAP is the superior protocol in comparison to UPnP MediaServer". When he was visited our office for his presentation on Avahi, he claimed that Zeroconf is better than UPnP itself, his argument being that Zeroconf uses simple ASCII text files and that makes it much more compatible with other Internet protocols, while UPnP uses XML (corrections welcomed). Here are a few points for him to consider:

  • UPnP is much more than addressing and discovery: Zeroconf defines standards for the addressing and discovery of services on a network but do no define any means for description, control, event notification and presentation. While this allows the services to choose any mechanism for any or all of these, the point being that UPnP itself isn't really comparable to Zeroconf but only two of it's parts.

  • ASCII is superior to XML?: how come? Just because MS supports XML or other Internet protocols didn't choose to use it?

  • "Microsoft/Intel started to include a similar technology in UPnP, the UPnP MediaServer". Media Server is based on UPnP not part of it in any way.

  • It's pronounced GUPnP, not gUPnP (thats the logo). :)

  • GUPnP is *not* an implementation of any particular service or device but a framework to create control-points, devices and services on top of it.

  • RAOP is obviously not superior to Media Renderer as it uses modified RTSP/RTP, while Media Renderer (and Media Server) standards allow you to implement any number of protocols for streaming the media, while it mandates the HTTP protocol so all devices have at least one protocol in common. Since these technologies target streaming of non-live media between devices connected to local LAN, I really don't see any reason not to just use HTTP.
Blog moved to blogger.com

I am moving my blog to blogger.com so that people can comment on my blog. Nothing should change for subscribers of my blog as advogato has blog syndication feature.

Comments

Unknown said…
I couldn't immediately find a way to navigate to the blogger site to post comments from the advogato page. Maybe I just missed something obvious, though.
September 16, 2007 at 9:23 AM
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