Benefits of UPnP?
 

I have done a quick search on upnp and gained a little background on it but I am still a little confused about when it should be used. My main question is that I have a Samba media server that streams to my xbox (not a 360). The xbox can use UPnP for accessing the data, but I have it just 'opening' the file and playing it off the server. What would really be the difference between what I am doing now and utilizing a UPnP protocol?

Thanks

upnp provides a slightly enriched structure to provide data to the client. I've been using tversity and twonkyvision, and by using them to serve the data rather than stright off a disk, they server is able to provide all the data structures it is coded to do. for example listings by style from the mp3 id3 tag, first letter of artist, artificial heirarchies like genre/artist/album even if the files themselves are just in a flat directory etc... took me a while, and i'm still a bit vague on who's job it is to do what... i *think* it's the servers job to transcode any media into known subsets of acceptable data for the rendered (the client in upnp land) but still a few vagaries. it also promotes zero configuration as well using multicast to find servers automatically and all osrts of other things like that.

You can think of the difference between what you are doing and UPnP as being similar to the difference between a static IP address and using DHCP.

In the first case, you are directly specifying the address and manually configuring the additional parameters (netmask, gateway, DNS, etc.). In the second, your machine asks the net, "Are there any DHCP servers", and gets a response with the necessary information.

Similarly, with a UPnP protocol, your machine would ask "Are there any media servers". It could then select from the offered content.

So it sounds like there is really not much of a benefit to change to UPnP. My concern was if the data being streamed under UPnP was a more compressed stream, ie. to conserve bandwidth across the network. Thanks for the help!

well that's a grey area to me, i'm not sure who's job it is... there should be a benefit when it's done on the server side for the network, but then there's cpu load on the server and maybe you don't need the bandwidth boost anyway. as i mentioned though, there's more to upnp than just that.