Re: on crawling upnp contentdirectories...

[Iago Toral <itoral igalia com>]

On Tue, 25 Jan 2011 12:12:37 +0200, Jussi Kukkonen 
<jku linux intel com> wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> I've been experimenting with crawling UPnP contentdirectories
> (mediaservers) lately. For those who haven't seen earlier discussion,
> the rationale for doing this is that many meadiaservers do not 
> support
> search, and the browse trees they offer can be pretty weird -- or at
> least very different from the UI design of a specific media player 
> UI.
> Crawling and caching would allow us to implement very fast searching
> locally, avoiding that problem.
>
> I've got a grilo-upnp implementation of this (see crawler branch):
>   http://gitorious.org/jku-grilo/grilo-plugins
>   git://gitorious.org/jku-grilo/grilo-plugins.git
>
> ...but after some discussions we decided I shouldn't send the patches 
> or
> continue the work, at least for now. Reasons for this:
>  * caching idea is orthogonal to what grilo currently is
>  * there are performance issues -- like memory use -- that could be
> problematic on mobile/embedded scenarios. Grilo just isn't designed 
> for
> holding unknown numbers of media items in memory "just in case"
>  * we should be able to do better than per-application, per-instance,
> non-persistent caching...

did you consider disk-caching using a lightway database (something like 
sqlite)? I think that would address at least the 2 last bullets.

> So, I'm currently looking at implementing this feature in a better 
> place
> in the infrastructure. Tracker seems like an obvious choice, even 
> though
> that probably means quite a bit more work than working with your nice
> little upnp plugin.

Mmm... So your current approach is to have tracker using grilo to get 
the crawl the upnp servers and store it in its local database?
And then, when selecting a upnp server for a search operation, use the 
tracker plugin instead to retrieve the content?

> There's one commit that you might want anyway: e165b81b removes the
> GUPNPAV_OLD_VERSION checks and makes the code a lot more readable. I 
> can
> send that as patch as well if that's easier.

That sure is useful. Juan or Guillaume, can you check it out?

Iago