[annodex-dev] Playing with annodex

[Jamie Honan]

I've had some free time recently and looked a little bit into
Annodex.

Specifically, I was interested in how Annodex files might be viewed
on an ordinary TV. Would it make sense?

I happen to have a Zensonic Z400 media player, a device which is oem'ed
under many different names, the most notable being the D-Link DSM-320.
It's quite a cheap device, I bought mine for $240 Aus.

This device plays back many file formats and codec formats: ogg,
mp3 mpeg1 and 2, mpeg4, divx etc.

The device needs a upnp head end. Under Linux, this invariably means
using the Intel libupnp library together with a Upnp device server.

There are several for Linux : uShare, gmediaserver, mediatomb among
others.

My idea was to take an Annodex file, decode the xml information inside
and present it rather in the form of a program guide using libupnp.

When the user selected something from this menu, then the server would
select the relevant video and present it to the player.

My plan is complicated by methods used inside Upnp. I would
much prefer a streaming output, with the media player being rather
dumb, and remote control clicks being sent back to the server.

This isn't the way the current Upnp is implemented inside this media
device. (I notice the Upnp spec is being updated to allow more for this
kind of thing - remote gui).

uShare is the simplest of the device managers, mediatomb has a great
deal of flexibility, embedding a javascript interpreter making
tailoring somewhat easier.

The question in my mind is this: Is this all too hard to fit
into a Upnp framework? Is there a natural fit?

To reiterate. The Zensonic/D-Link is in one of two modes: one is selecting
from a menu that has eseentially decided by a head end, the other
is playing sound/video. To get a menu, the user has to stop playing
video. The head end knows this and can tailor the menu at this point.

It may be possible to put some kind of overlay into the video at various
points (white rabbit, more info...) but I really haven't dug deeply into
the Upnp spec and how it is implemented.

Anyway, I just wanted to document some of this in case my
interest moves on.

Regards
Jamie