Media Server

In home networks, multimedia content sharing has become commonplace. An open industry standard for seamless multimedia content access, called Digital Living Network Alliance (DLNA), provides guidelines designed to facilitate contents discovery, management, sharing, and distribution in consumer environment. Consumer experience with DLNA certified devices, however, has been rather poor and usability not up to speed. Despite the availability of DLNA interoperability guidelines, manufacturer customizations often lead to limited compatibility. Such compatibility issues lead to limited interoperability and are difficult to identify. In order to solve these problems, the design and implementation of an interoperability analyzer for DLNA devices is presented in this paper. The proposed analyzer monitors the home network, performs analysis of the underlying protocols used by DLNA, and identifies compatibility and interoperability issues between the devices. Especially, its Filter Component e...

DLNA based media sharing is very popular nowadays. In current DLNA specification, a DLNA device advertises its presence to everyone in the network. Any control point application receiving the advertisement can access/control the device. However, with increasing popularity and availability of public Wi-Fi hotspots, it is necessary for devices to have some sort of access control. DLNA specification has no mandatory authentication procedure. So a device receiving a request from any unwanted control point cannot block/verify its access. The UPnP recommended authentication procedure is computationally expensive and complex for most personal devices. So, in this paper we propose a simple User-Agent based access control system that is effective to protect devices from unwanted control point applications.