Developer:Media Server Extensions

Introduction

The ContentDirectory service has various limitations which become apparent when implementing control points on different hardware platforms. This document aims to outlines some ideas that address various shortcomings of the ContentDirectory specification.

DHCP

At present all media servers return URIs that contain a reference to their IP addresses, e.g. http://172.20.1.1/music.flac etc, which means that if the DHCP server was to changed the media server's IP address, then any control point or media renderer with URIs that reference that media server become invalid.

It is proposed that a media server should always reference itself by host name and not by IP address in any XML that it sends to external devices, i.e. http://mynas/music.flac.

Disc Information

It is proposed that two new properties are added to the musicTrack item called OriginalDiscNumber and OriginalDiscCount

Replay Gain Information

It is proposed that four new properties are added to the musicTrack item called ReplayGainAlbum, ReplayGainAlbumPeak, ReplayGainTrack, and ReplayGainTrackPeak.

Image Resolution

Every hardware platform that a control point is written on has different memory limits. This means that a control point on a PC is capable of displaying images of a high resolution, where as a control point on a PDA can only display images at a much lower resolution.

Currently available media servers try to solve this problem in largely by the one of the two methods below,

1. A configurable parameter that scales all artwork to a user defined size
2. A profile system where a user can create profiles for each class of control point they have and configure a parameter that scales all artwork to a user defined size per profile

These systems are fundamentally flawed as they are trying to infer what a control point want, rather than allowing a control point to ask the media server for the information it wants.

It is proposed that the all image URIs allow a parameter size to be specified. This parameter size allows a control point to ask for the image at a specified size, e.g. if the media server provided the URI http://server/artwork.jpg then the control point would make the following request to get the image at a resolution of 512x512, http://server/artwork.jpg?size=512. It is then up to the media server to try and service this request as best possible.

informationURI

The current specification does not easily allow a control point to provide rich information about objects in the browse hierarchy.

It is proposed to add a property to the object class called informationURI which will contain a URI to a website that provides a rich collection of information about the object, e.g. for a musicArtist container it would provided a link to a website that provided information about the artist. It is then up to the website to present the information in a way desirable to the end user.

artworkURI

The current specification only allows retrieval of artwork for a musicAlbum container, through the property albumArtURI. When browsing a music library on a control point it quickly become clear that to implement a graphically rich control point the ContentDirectory service should provide a way to retrieve artwork for all of the content directory classes, not just musicAlbum containers.

There has become a somewhat defacto standard where just about all media server provide an albumArtURI property for a musicItem item, as well as for a musicAlbum container, however this is still not good enough to implement a graphically rich control point.

It is proposed that a new property is introduced to the object class called ArtworkURI which contains a list of URIs.

For pragmatic reasons the property should perhaps be called albumArtURI, as I suspect that the vast majority of control points in the market today do not use the class type to figure out what properties to parse from the DIDLLite XML and so will automatically use the albumArtURI property if it present in the object's XML description.