Active content transcoding in networked environment

Networked systems are used, amongst others, to share contents, share resources, and remotely control devices. Quite often contents at a server cannot be rendered by a renderer (client) in a network because of encoding format mismatches, network protocol mismatches, etc. A novel way of using UPnP (Universal Plug and Play) to implement a fully transparent network transcoder is proposed in this article. The principle of the Active Network Transcoder (ANT), its architecture, and some details of the implementation are described.