Apple Bonjour/Rendezvous + Zeroconf/mDNS

[joe877]

hello all. you guys have done fantastic work on xbmc! i love xbmp to death and xbmc is even better!

i would like to request that the developers consider adding rendezvous (zeroconf) support to xbmc. for those unfamiliar with it, it's what apple's using in, for example, itunes. if anyone here has tried the new itunes client for windows, if you have two windows machines (or a windows machine and a mac, or whatever), you might have already realized how simple it is to share music between each other with rendezvous; simply name your machine, click a button and you're done! as machines go on and off the network, the list of shares automatically updates. it's incredibly slick from a user perspective.

for those unfamiliar with rendezvous (formally known as zeroconf; rendezvous is the name apple gave it), among other things, it allows for network service advertisement and discovery. so once it's implemented, it's trivial for a program to say, "hey, i'm sharing music" or to say, "let me get a list of all computers sharing music." it's slick, transparent, and saves the user from having to deal with all the messy details of ip addresses and the like. anyone who's seen the various "help!" posts on the xbox message boards can probably attest that a simple configuration is a really, really good thing.

suppose that xbmc implements it, and also, say, relax does. configuring your relax server becomes "name it, click 'ok'". xbmc would just automatically see it; no configuration file editing necessary. your computer on a dynamic ip? no problem; you don't need to worry about it. furthermore, maybe your friend brought his laptop over? he would simply have to load relax and boom, his media would be viewable on xbmc, too! you don't need to look up his ip and add it to xbmc's config file; the service is just available. you can imagine the possibilities here.

more information about rendezvous is available via apple's website and, of course, google. this group claims to have an open-source implementation available for windows and for linux. if their code could be used, i can see incredible possibilities:

http://www.swampwolf.com/products/


thanks for such a fantastic program!

[Mysom]

i couldn't agree more, the addition of rendezvous support to both xbmc and relax / xbms would make life so much easier for most people. while my coding abilities are quite rusty and i do not have much familiarity with the xbmc code i've looked a bit into implementing this kind of feature.

at first look the howl api seemed quite appealing, but i think it is hamstrung by the fact that it expects an mdns daemon to exist. as far as i can tell there is no code available for their windows port of apple's mdnsresponder. as such, unless there is someway of making the windows mdns servcie usable for the xbox it would be necessary to port the mdns daemon for use with xbmc, which for all i know will break the api.

so what appear to be the best two options are to either work with apple's code, which will probably be some work but the most efficient solution.

the other option is the use of a python implementation of a mdns, which given the built in python interpreter might be the simplest albeit kludgiest solution. the only obvious limitation being the ability of python scripts to interact with the interface to list shares discovered via rendezvous.

-mysom

[Guybrush]

i have been looking to implement this a long time ago, but was stuck on to get multicast working with the xbox.

afaik, xbox doesnt support multicast, which zeroconf uses... too bad

xbmsp does have a similiar discover feature tho, add this in your config.xml under videos/music/whatever:

<share>
* * * *<name>discover xbmsp shares</name>
* * * *<url>xbmsp://*</url>
* * * *<cachesize>256</cachesize>
* * *</share>

this will add an item "discover xbmsp shares", when choosen it will broadcast a discover packet and the xbmsp shares on your local network will respond.

i wonder why this item isnt included in the default config

[joe877]

bhellium, i'm not quite sure that i understand you correctly when you say:

if i am not mistaken rendevouz sets up a ipbased network an a 192.x.x.x subnet maknig it impossible to access internet thru it.


adding rendezvous support would it no way interfere with the other networking (being able to access streams online, etc.). true, it's local only and thus cannot discover internet-only services, but that's simply impossible. no way to discover services on millions upon millions of nodes. the whole point is that it would give the addition of discovering local sharing in an easy manner. again, it'd only be adding functionality, not removing any. so i can't think of a better solution, personally. did you have one in mind that i'm missing?


guybrush, i didn't realize that option was available. that will definitely help, so thanks! certainly it's nice to have, but it would be cleaner to use an existing (and good!) services-discovery protocol.

if the xbox really doesn't support multicast, then yeah, that's a huge problem. do you happen to remember where you read that? a quick google perusal didn't reveal anything for me.

[Guybrush]

i did some more digging in the rfc and on google, it seems it also works with unicast dns queries. so it doesnt depend on multicast alto apple does concentrate on that.

found alot of info on: www.dotlocal.org

[Bhellium]

what i ment with it is that since i still have to fiddle with ip settings
the actual ease of use dissapears. if i still have to add my ip in the
settingsfile why not at the sametime add the shares...
i do think it is a good idea but i wonder if it will be worth the work...

/bhellium

[Hullebulle]

Originally Posted by (bhellium @ oct. 26 2003,19:06)

what i ment with it is that since i still have to fiddle with ip settings
the actual ease of use dissapears. if i still have to add my ip in the
settingsfile why not at the sametime add the shares...
i do think it is a good idea but i wonder if it will be worth the work...

/bhellium

well settings the ip within the gui of xbmc would be nice then, but entering a share with the virtual keyboard wouldn't be fun.

[Bhellium]

well if we are moving into the possibillity of setting up xbmc *
from the gui then a zeroconf share solution is a must.

/bhellium

[kloopi]

hi,

since apple released their rendezvous source code (rendezvous is a technology to automatically discover and advertise services on a network, its used by itunes to discover other itunes music shares on the network automatically) i'd like to ask if it is possible to integrate into xbmc, or/and if there are plans to to?

regards,
kloopi

ps: here is a link to the source code:
rendezvous

[Mysom]

so when i've had time over the last week or so i've figured a few things out:

first: xdk does not support multicast (stated in the documentation) and baring the creation of a new tcp/ip stack i dont have any idea how you'd be able to get multicast working.

second: as stated previously there is the possibility of implementing service discovery using unicast as long as a mdns server is running on the local network and someone implements a discovery process that is compatible with the xdk.

so in looking at apple's mdnsresponder code it appears that it supports unicast service discovery and everything that would be needed, but the code is definitely well beyond my limited abilities. my simple minded attempts to integrate some of apple's code resulted in compile errors that did not make sense to me.

so for anyone with the ability and time, it would be great if you could look through the dnsservices and dnsservicesdiscovery code that is included within the windows section of the most recent mdnsresponder cvs code. as far as i can tell all that is needed is to strip out anything multicast related and fix whatever using winsockx breaks.

-mysom