Information technology - UPnP Device Architecture - Part 20-1: Audio video device control protocol - Level 4 - Audio video architecture

1.1 Introduction
This document describes the overall UPnP AV Architecture, which forms the foundation for the UPnP AV Device and Service templates. The AV Architecture defines the general interaction between UPnP control points and UPnP AV devices. It is independent of any particular device type, content format, and transfer protocol. It supports a variety of devices such as TVs, VCRs, CD/DVD players/jukeboxes, set top boxes, stereos systems, MP3 players, still-image cameras, camcorders, electronic picture frames (EPFs), and the PC. The AV Architecture allows devices to support different types of formats for the entertainment content (such as MPEG2, MPEG4, JPEG, MP3, Windows Media Architecture (WMA), bitmaps (BMP), NTSC, PAL, ATSC, etc.) and multiple types of transfer protocols (such as IEC-61883/IEEE-1394, HTTP GET, RTP, HTTP PUT/POST, TCP/IP, etc.). The following clauses describe the AV Architecture and how the various UPnP AV devices and services work together to enable various end-user scenarios.

1.2 GoalsThe UPnP AV Architecture was explicitly defined to meet the following goals:

- To support arbitrary transfer protocols and content formats.

- To enable the AV content to flow directly between devices without any intervention from the control point.

- To enable control points to remain independent of any particular transfer protocol and content format. This allows control points to transparently support new protocols and formats.

- Scalability, i.e. support of devices with very low resources, especially memory and processing power as well as full-featured devices.

- Synchronized playback to multiple rendering devices.
- Access Control, Content Protection, and Digital Rights Management.

1.3 Non-Goals

The UPnP AV Architecture does not enable any of the following:

- Two-way Interactive Communication, such as audio and video conferencing, Internet gaming, etc.