On Wed, Jan 11, 2012 at 7:40 AM, Timothy Murphy gayleard@eircom.net wrote:
John R Pierce wrote:
its part of multimedia home network plug and play, I believe... lets media boxes find media servers, and such. if you were to serve up streaming media on a home network, it would be a useful thing to have. otherwise? meh.
Could you give a concrete example of such a setup, please?
I must admit I'm rather confused by UPnP. Is it intended for devices that don't have an IP address? Or how does it fit in with dhcpd?
It is for devices with IP, but to find names that aren't officially registered in a DNS server. For example if you have a Playstation 3, or a newer blu-ray player that supports network streaming it will use DHCP to get an address. But then suppose you install your own DLNA media server like ps3mediaserver (or have windows 7 home premium which includes one). Without registering your new server name in DNS, the device will be able to find the service if it is on the same lan. I think Macs use it to find printers too.