The UPnP-Inspector

An UPnP Device and Service analyzer based on Coherence

Author

Frank Scholz

Copyright

2008 by Frank Scholz, 2014 by Hartmut Goebel

Licence

MIT licence

Homepage

http://coherence-project.org/wiki/UPnP-Inspector

The UPnP-Inspector (The Inspector) is an UPnP Device and Service analyzer based on Coherence. The Inspector helps analyzing UPnP devices and services on your networks. It's both a big help for debugging and a learning tool. The Inspector is loosely modeled after the Intel UPnP Device Spy and the UPnP Test Tool.

Beside the analyzing functions, The Inspector can act as a simple UPnP ControlPoint. You can browse the content of DLNA MediaServers and control MediaRenderers, e.g. make them play music directly from the Media Server.

Features

• inspect UPnP devices, services, actions and state-variables
• invoke actions on any service
• extract UPnP device- and service-description xml-files
• follow and analyze events
• interact with well-known devices:
  • browse the ContentDirectory of an UPnP A/V MediaServer and inspect its containers and items
  • control an UPnP A/V MediaRenderer

Release 0.2.2 - Let the Sunshine In - includes:

• a control-window for UPnP A/V MediaRenderers
• Drag 'n Drop functionality from the MediaServer Browse window to the MediaRenderer control
• a 'Rediscover Devices' menu item
• a 'Refreshing Container' context menu item and an overall refresh upon closing the MediaServer Browse window
• support for dlna-playcontainer URIs
• displaying all elements from a DIDLLite fragment

Installing pre-build packages

Windows

Please use the setup.exe found at the project download page.

GNU/Linux

Most current GNU/Linux distributions provide packages for The Inspector. Using your Linux distributions software installation tool look for a package like upnp-inspector. Otherwise you may install The Inspector from source, which is easy on recent GNU/Linux systems.

Other platforms

Currently we do not know of any prebuild packages for other platforms. If you know, please drop us a note.

Requirements and Installation from Source

The Inspector requires

• Python 2.x or higher (tested with 2.6, but other versions should work, too, Python 3.x is not supported),
• setuptools or distribute for installation (see below),
• PyGTK, and of course
• Coherence >= 0.6.4 and
• Twisted (which is required by Coherence).

Hints for installing on Windows

Following the links above you will find .msi and .exe-installers. For PyGTK we suggest using the all-in-one installer. Simply install this and continue with installing The Inspector.

You may want to build an installer exe yourself. Please refer to the win32 directory of The Inspectors source distribution.

Hints for installing on GNU/Linux

Most current GNU/Linux distributions provide packages for the requirements. Look for packages names like python-setuptools and python-gtk2 or pygtk2.0. Simply install them and continue with installing The Inspector.

Hint for installing on other platforms

Many vendors provide Python. Please check your vendors software repository. Otherwise please download Python 2.6 (or any higher version from the 2.x series) from http://www.python.org/download/ and follow the installation instructions there.

After installing Python, install setuptools. You may want to read More Hints on Installing setuptools first.

Compiling and installing GTK+ and PyGTK for your platform may be cumbersome. It may not even be supported. Sorry, we can not help here further.

Installing The Inspector

When you are reading this you most probably already downloaded and unpacked The Inspector. Thus installing is as easy as running:

python ./setup.py install

Otherwise you may install directly using setuptools/easy_install. If your system has network access installing The Inspector is a breeze:

easy_install upnp-inspector

Without network access download The Inspector from http://pypi.python.org/pypi/upnp-inspector and run:

easy_install upnp-inspector-*.tar.gz

More Hints on Installing setuptools

The Inspector uses setuptools for installation. Thus you need either

• network access, so the install script will automatically download and install setuptools if they are not already installed

or

• the correct version of setuptools pre-installed using the EasyInstall installation instructions. Those instructions also have tips for dealing with firewalls as well as how to manually download and install setuptools.

Custom Installation Locations

The Inspector is just a single script (aka Python program). So you can copy it where ever you want (maybe fixing the first line). But it's easier to just use:

# install to /usr/local/bin
python ./setup.py install --prefix /usr/local

# install to your Home directory (~/bin)
python ./setup.py install --home ~

Please mind: This effects also the installation of setuptools if they are not already installed.

For more information about Custom Installation Locations please refer to the Custom Installation Locations Instructions before installing The Inspector.