[mythtv-commits] Ticket #12767: Issues with DLNA clients

[MythTV]

#12767: Issues with DLNA clients
-------------------------------------+------------------------
 Reporter:  Dylan Walkden <dylan@…>  |          Owner:  dblain
     Type:  Bug Report - General     |         Status:  new
 Priority:  minor                    |      Milestone:  0.28.1
Component:  MythTV - UPnP            |        Version:  0.28.0
 Severity:  medium                   |     Resolution:
 Keywords:  dnla upnp                |  Ticket locked:  0
-------------------------------------+------------------------

Comment (by stuartm):

 VLC is known to have a broken UPnP implementation. I believe the bugs have
 been filed with them, but it wouldn't hurt to check and add your
 experiences in their bug tracker.

 There are several bugs, but the one most applicable here is that they
 don't support discovery of UPnP/DLNA servers with versions greater than 1.
 MythTV implements version 4. The UPnP spec states that clients MUST
 connect to servers supporting later versions - As UPnP is backwards
 compatible a v1 client can connect to a v4 server with no issues.

 Other issues include the indexing behaviour of VLC - once connected to the
 server it proceeds to crawl all the media available (this is contrary to
 the intention of UPnP spec). However making things worse it fetches the
 metadata for files one at a time instead of in batches, it sends no
 filters with the requests and with a large enough media collection this
 means thousands, tens of thousands of consecutive requests are made to the
 UPnP server consuming large amounts of bandwith instead of a few dozen
 calls returning only the metadata which will actually be used. This
 amounts to an unintended Denial of Service attack on the server.

 TLDR; VLC's UPnP implementation is terrible, badly written and riddled
 with bugs. Neither DLNA nor UPnP compliant.

--
Ticket URL: <https://code.mythtv.org/trac/ticket/12767#comment:18>
MythTV <http://www.mythtv.org>
MythTV Media Center