It's projects like this that really illustrate the promise of the OSD: combine open source code, open standards and google summer of code and suddenly you get interoperability with a host of pc media players. It also serves to remind that a great application of the OSD is streaming audio from the PC to your stereo (or net radio shortly). The efforts to port XMMS2 to the OSD are ongoing, and now Progeny's recent Google Summer of Code project to bring uPnP to the OSD. If you're not familiar with uPNP, the demo video here should bring you up to speed (at least on one possible application). Basically what we've implemented so far is the ability to share not only your audio collection but all the media management from your PC media player to the OSD. This means if you've spent time rating your songs, creating playlist, etc then you can have all that information located in one central place and access it from your OSD.

By putting aside the proprietary nonsense that has long been the bane of multimedia home networking, the OSD was able to integrate with a long list of uPNP compliant devices. It seems pretty clear that the way to bridge the home networking morass with true seamless integration is through open standards.

Thanks Progeny! and Thanks Google!