Metadata Integration and Media Transcoding in Universal-Plug-and-Play (UPnP) Enabled Networks

Abstract

Universal plug and play (UPnP) is a widely accepted standard for automatically detecting devices and services in a local area network as well as for describing and controlling them. In order to deal with multimedia devices and especially content, in 2002 the UPnP-AV standard definition was released. It defines device and service descriptions for media servers and renderers. Thereby, the media server's content directory service allows an easy management and the exchange of metadata about the provided media data. Media content became browsable by semantic meta information about it. There are still two major drawbacks of UPnP-AV, which make its usage in real world multimedia communication scenarios very difficult. First, searching for similar content on distributed media servers with a huge number of media files is not economically possible. Second, the media content must be consumed by Renderers as provided by the Servers, independently of their terminal capabilities and network connections. In order to deal with these two drawbacks, this work proposes a novel approach of metadata integration and media transcoding in UPnP networks. First, the Media Server is extended by a control point which offers discovery of other media servers and fetches metadata from their content directories. Furthermore, it integrates the gathered information in its own content directory. Control Points are then able to query this Integrating Media Server for a desired content, and get a network-complete search result. Second, terminal and network capabilities of the Renderers are taken into account in order to transcode and transmit the content in a suitable way for the consuming device. These two approaches of metadata integration and media data adaptation enable searchable logical views on tailored multimedia content in UPnP-AV networks.