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The multi-room media manager server m3server provides an approach to unify different media distribution technologies in your home network.

One typical scenario is having multiple UPnP Media Renderer devices and one or more UPnP Media Servers throughout the house. With an UPnP Control Point application (like the Android App "Bubble UPnP" for example) you can play content from the UPnP Media Server to the UPnP Media Renderers.

The issues you are going to fight with in such a scenario are:

• most UPnP Media Servers cannot deal with large libraries (indexing takes ages)
• playing media on a UPnP Media Renderer fails
• the UPnP Control Point application has a very limited functionality
• broken support for playlist management
• most of the UPnP Media Servers do not have the search capability implemented (especially not with large libraries)

With m3server we are implementing the media library functionality in a protocol independent way and provide different protocol adapters to support the various media distribution technologies. In a first approach we are supporting the following protocol adapters:

• UPnP
• HTTP

The UPnP adapter implements a UPnP Media Server which makes the library content available via the UPnP Media Server protocol. It also implements the functionality of a UPnP Control Point in order to control media servers and renderers.

The HTTP adapter provides a HTML/jQuery user-interface for accessing the library via a web browser (incl. mobile).

Ideas for other adapters exists, but there is currently no plan when to implement them. For example an AirPlay adapter, which plays media on AirPlay capable devices could useful, or a Music Player Daemon (MPD) adapter which uses the MPD server to play media.

The m3server sits on top of the structure, which is managed by the m3util utility tool-chain.

The following architecture diagram shows the main concepts: