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Hello! Daniel from Opera here
and I'm going to send a video from this to that
using the Network Service Discovery API.
It's a new W3C spec and we've just released a build which implements it.
Only for UPnP at the moment but here's how it works.
What it does is it gives you a list of services
that belong to different devices within your local network,
so you can find those devices and then communicate with them.
We've got a couple of demos we've prepared.
One is a bit like a UPnP inspector.
It enables you to look at what's available on the network
and send XML requests to them and receive responses
and you can debug, you can change the values and things like that.
It's useful for testing and learning, so I'm going to have a quick go,
trying to connect to the XBMC-based GeexBox
that I've got running on the TV behind me, but it could be any UPnP renderer.
First of all, if you use GeexBox
(it's a live USB so it's nice and easy to setup)
you need to make sure that in the Settings -> Network page,
you have the UPnP options at the top enabled.
One is for the client side, one is for the server side.
I think it's best to enable both of them just in case.
So this is all well and good.
And over here, I'm going to send a message to this.
The message I'm going to send is one of the preset options which is to set it to mute.
You may not be able to see but in the top right,
we should see a little red icon appearing if it goes to mute.
And there we go. A very small change but that's now muted.
Not very interesting and possibly you can't even see it,
so let's move onto something a bit more interesting.
This demo we have here.
First of all, it shows the renderers that it can find on the network.
Now a renderer is something that can play media files.
It's found the local files (devices) and now we're checking the XBMC option.
Now we're looking for a server that's going to serve media files to this.
I've got MediaTomb installed in here but it could be another server
that you've got set up on your network.
Within MediaTomb I'm now going to browse through directories to the video that I've prepared.
Here we go.
And when I press Enter, it should play.
Phew, it works!
So, there we go.
It's not actually sending the video.
The build that implements the API does not send files.
All it does is find devices, looks at the services they offer and then matches them up together.
It's a match-maker in a dating agency, effectively, in your network.
So it's hooking up the server and the renderer and voila.
There are many more use-cases - we'd love to hear about them so please,
in the article, where we also link to these demos and link to the API,
please let us know what you think, your ideas, any problems you may find.
It's a very very young spec but I think there's a lot of opportunity, a lot of potential there.
So, we look forward to hearing your feedback.
Knock yourself out!