Netzflocken

I now own too the certificates to operate a pleasure craft on rivers and on the largest lake here in Germany - the Bodensee, or Lake Constance in English.

Now what’s missing is the yacht.

Coherence is one out of four finalists in the category “Media”
of this years Trophées du libre.

Kudos once more to Erwan Velu for his magnificent promotion!

Media collections - being it all songs from one album, a list of favorites, or an image slideshow - have not attracted much attention in the world of UPnP A/V.

Of course there are the ContentDirectory objects playlistContainer and playlistItem, but these - if at all - are mostly used to point to some M3U file. And in addition, the client has to support that format. Another drawback is that M3U files don’t fit very well into the UPnP A/V philosophy. A ControlPoint will only know about the M3U file, but not which item of it is played at the moment. Or what metadata is associated with that item. Neither are next and previous operations implementable.

So the task of handling the collection was handed off to the ControlPoint. It was responsible now for holding a list of items to play and to instruct the MediaRenderer to load and play the next item in the list the moment the previous was finished. With the drawback that this list has to be created somehow first.

Same for the autonomous MediaClient, like the Playstation 3 or the XBox 360, their internal part of a ControlPoint usually just continues with the next item in the container.

Now that wasn’t a big issue in the days when we had only autistic autonomous MediaClients, but now more and more real MediaRenderers - meaning alongside to their internal client UI they are (remote) controllable by a ControlPoint - are available. The new Sony Bravia TV 4500 or 5500 series are maybe the most prominent example.

But the DLNA specification offers an interesting approach - they created the dlna-playcontainer URI.

That’s the uri for an additional res element a MediaServer can add automatically to an existent container.
Encoded in the uri is

• the UDN of the device, the MediaServer
• the service type, usually a ContentDirectory
• the container id
• the id of the first item
• the index of the first item
• the optional sort-criteria
• the max-depth information - aka the level of subcontainers, optional too

It looks a bit like this:

dlna-playcontainer://uuid:fe814e3e-1234-4321-1431-383fb599cc01?sid=urn:upnp-org:serviceId:ContentDirectory&cid=1441&fid=1444&fii=0&sc=&md=0

With that information a MediaRenderer is now able to call a Browse action on the ContentDirectory service of that device and retrieve all the items of that container. And propagate with AVTransportURI/AVTransportURIMetaData the “dlna-playcontainer” uri and with CurrentTrackURI/CurrentTrackMetaData the track item uri and the corresponding metadata.

I’ve started to add that functionality to the Coherence MediaServers and to the GStreamer MediaRenderer.
It will be part of the upcoming 0.6.4 release of Coherence and the 0.2.2 release of the UPnP-Inspector.

As the specification doesn’t describe the whole thing in detail and I haven’t seen yet an UPnP A/V MediaServer beside Coherence supporting this I’m glad about any feedback.

Thanks to the assiduous work of Erwan Velu, Coherence is one of the participants of the Trophées du Libre 2009 contest in the category ‘Media’.

The finalists will be announced April 22nd - please keep your fingers crossed.

For immediate press-release:

The Coherence DLNA/UPnP project announces today that its UPnP BinaryLight Demonstrator adheres to the European Commission’s proposal for progressively phasing out incandescent bulbs.

“Once more Coherence demonstrates hereby its innovative and forward-looking orientation and emphasizes being the number one DLNA/UPnP framework of the world!” says Frank Scholz, lead-developer of Coherence. “We hope that others will follow our example and throw overboard their frumpishness.”

Independent experts assert that the energy consumption for displaying this image of an energy-saving light bulb is less than 20% compared to an incandescent bulb. And that this image will last at least five times longer too.

European energy commissioner Andris Pielbalgs delightedly expresses: “Even such a small appearing change can make a big difference!”

Germanys ex-chancellor Helmut Kohl said “This is an excellent example for the innovative strength of Germany and Europe, and I encourage the current legislation to use energy-saving light bulbs for illumination of the data-highways too.”

Yesterday I successfully passed the exams for the

International certificate
for operators of pleasure craft
on the waterways navigable by sea-going ships

Thanks a million to Dirk from sail & more for his excellent preparation and training!

I finally lashed myself to replace my very, very old, first-adopter instance of TextPress by new and shiny Zine, its enhanced successor.

Thanks to the awesome work of the guys behind Zine that transition was an easy, painless task.

I stumbled upon these two thinks the last days, which both I’m immediately ready to sign.

Even if they are - but only on a first glance - a bit contradictorily.

• Manifesto for Software Craftmanship
• The Cult of Done Manifesto

FOSDEM was great!

A much larger embedded dev-room, free bus-transportation from the venue to the train station and even a cloak-room!
Thanks to all the people there for making that event possible.

For someone living in one of Germany’s wine-areas attending the FOSDEM Beer Event is quite a challenge.
I read that this year the bill was a new record, exceeding 10.000,- €.

And it was time for enjoying some other Belgian specialties too - at the best chippy, at least the best that was open on early Saturday morning and in walking distance from the Delirium Café.

Larger View

I had switched from car to plane as I feared a bit the announced snow in Brussels and did not wanted to end in some other 100km traffic-jam driving home on Sunday evening, but not one snow-flake showed up over the weekend.

But that gave Lufthansa the opportunity to serve me another culinary extravaganza on my flights to and from Brussels.

PS: Remind myself next year that the Godiva store near the venue is closed on Sundays.
PPS: Our spontaneous Coherence meeting was a big success too, but more on that in separate post.

The last year has seen an increasing number of DLNA/UPnP devices reach the market - TVs, Gaming Consoles, Audio Players, Amplifiers, Cell Phones,...
DLNA is everywhere; now more than ever open software is needed to bring all these devices together!

2008 was a great year for Coherence:

• no less than five releases
• many new backends like Ampache, Apple-Trailers, BBC podcasts, DVB-Daemon, Flickr, Gallery2, Lolcats, MetaTracker, TED.com videos
• on-the-fly audio transcoding using GStreamer
• unique Totem, Nautilus or Eye-Of-Gnome plugins
• KDE desktop applet that allows you to start Coherence
• many compatibility improvements, and work-arounds for non-compliant hardware e.g. Xbox 360
• DBus enhancements - simplifying the use of Coherence as a service
• device implementations other than Audio/Video, like BinaryLight or DimmableLight
• widely visible on Wikipedia & Freshmeat, even mentioned on Ars Technica

2009 looks to be another promising year:

Coherence has been successfully registered for the French "Trophees du Libre" (Free Software Awards) contest - cross your fingers pls ;o)
A new Youtube backend, opening the door to new online-content.

Comparing January 2008 & January 2009, the number of unique visitors to the Coherence website has increased three fold, now reaching over 6000 per month.

All your contributions bring more and more innovation in the DLNA/UPNP world and help making Coherence a great project.

Thanks all of you for using, participating in and promoting Coherence!