Abstract:
ABSTRACT
DLNA MEDIA SERVER FRAMEWORK FOR EMBEDDED SYSTEMS
by
Ajitabh Prakash Saxena
Master of Science in Computer Science
California State University, Chico
Spring 2011
Devices such as cell phones, set-top boxes, televisions, etc., are generating
digital entertainment content at an alarming rate. The challenge is to access and share
the content across these devices. Universal Plug and Play (UPnP) and Digital Living
Network Alliance (DLNA) specifications enable seamless sharing of digital content
across these devices. Many companies developed software development kits for rapid
development of UPnP and DLNA compliant devices.
This project identifies some of the limitations of currently available UPnP
software development kits with respect to their deployment on embedded systems. The
project also addresses these limitations by implementing the UPnP specifications with
major emphasis on its deployment in embedded devices. The project considers factors
such as memory footprint of SDK, portability across multiple operating systems, abstraction
of services, debug ability, development cost and performance. A simple
DLNA media server was also developed using the SDK and some open source
components. This effort was undertaken to prove that the framework can be used to develop
a DLNA compliant media server that can be effectively deployed on embedded
devices.
To test the portability across multiple operating systems the SDK was developed
using Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 environment along with Microsoft platform
SDK. As each development milestone was accomplished basic testing was performed
on Linux and Windows operating systems. After significant work was accomplished the
SDK was also tested on a MIPS based embedded system. Behavioral differences on all
the three platforms were noted and analyzed.