UPnP (Universal Plug and Play) supporting applications for playing video or music from a UPnP server or controlling a UPnP server are fairly common in the app store, and many of the applications are extremely popular. For those unfamiliar with UPnP – UPnP is a common communications architecture used by many devices, and supported by almost any media server you can buy.
If you are looking into building any sort of media playing application this service could be extremely useful to your users. I recently came across a Mac and iOS open source library that allows you to communicate with UPnP devices.
Included is a detailed step-by-step guide on building a UPnP client on an iPhone.
The library is UPnPX from Bruno Keymolen, and the Google Code page can be found here:
http://code.google.com/p/upnpx/
You can find the tutorial in the wiki here:
http://code.google.com/p/upnpx/wiki/tutorial
Full source for the tutorial is included in the SVN checkout.
If you have been looking to build an app that supports UPnP communications, or adding this feature into an app this should get you fof to a great start.
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