1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an apparatus and method for managing digital contents and, in particular, to a contents management server and method that analyze similarity of the contents distributed among at least one network element (e.g., contents server) and manage the contents on the basis of the analysis result.
2. Background of the Related Art
In recent years, as digital content has been widely used, the need to effectively manage a digital contents file emerges as an issue. In order to effectively manage content, there has been developed a digital content management (DCM) engine for analyzing similarity among digital contents files stored in the network elements.
In the meantime, home network systems have been progressed and the Digital Living Network Alliance (DLNA) has been proposed as a standard for home networking.
The DLNA is an alliance of leading members including Microsoft Corporation, International Business Machines Corporation, Hewlett-Packard Company, Intel Corporation, SONY Corporation, Panasonic Corporation, SAMSUNG Electronics Co., ltd., etc. for developing industry standards to allow products from all companies to be compatible with each other and to enable a network of electronic devices such as TV, VCR, digital camera, and audio components in the home. The DLNA has also focused on interoperability between networked entertainment and media devices for personal media uses involving imaging, audio and video.
The DLNA home network can be implemented on the basis of a wired network standard (IEEE 802.3) or a wireless network standard (IEEE 802.11), which interconnect a home server, a home gateway, and other devices such as Mobile-Digital Media Server (M-DMS), Mobile-Digital Media Renderer (M-DMR), and Mobile-Digital Media Player (M-DMP).
In particular, the DLNA guideline divides the home network devices into a Digital Media Server (DMS), and a Digital Media Player (DMP) or Digital Media Renderer (DMR), and specifies the interoperability between the DMS and DMP or DMR.
DMS assumes the function of a Media Server Device (MSD) under the Universal Plug and Play (UPnP) Audio-Visual (AV) part, which provides media contents. The main objective of the DMS is to enable the control point (CP) as a user interface (UI) application to retrieve digital media content items in the DMS such that the user can display or distribute the contents. The DMS is equipped with a broadcast signal receiver and middleware for broadcast. Some examples of DMS includes Video Cassette Recorders (VCRs), Compact Disc (CD) players, Digital Video Disk (DVD) players, Motion Pictures Expert Group 1 (MPEG-1) layer 3 (MP3) players, set-top boxes (STBs), TV tuners, radio tuners, personal computers (PCs), etc.
The DMR plays content received after being setup by another entity. Some examples of DMR devices include a TV, an audio/video receiver, a video monitor, and remote speakers for music.
The DMP is a DMR or M-DMR including the CP functioning to find content exposed by the DMS so as to afford playback and rendering capabilities.
One of the key technologies of utilized in the DLNA guidelines e.g., Home Networked Device Interoperability Guidelines v1.5, is UPnP. DMSs and DMPs are addressed and automatically recognized on the basis of the protocol specified in the UPnP device architecture. For example, the UPnP Media Server is the DMS providing a list of stored files and broadcasting the data.
The DLNA guidelines are based on the UPnP protocol and specify the design architecture of digital information products. Such digital information products as household appliances, PCs, and wireless devices can accordingly share media content over the wired or wireless home network.
Although the DLNA system enables the network elements to share multimedia content, the DCM engine can perform the similarity analysis only for the contents files stored in the local device; there thus exists no effective management for the multimedia contents distributed over the network.
Instead, even though the similarity analyses can be performed for all the respective network devices, this entails all network devices equipped with the DCM engines performing a similarity analysis on their, respective locally stored contents files. As a result, much central processing unit (CPU) processing overhead is wasted.
The arrangement is further disadvantageous in that the issuing of similarity analysis requests for all the network devices having DCM engines represents an inconvenient management burden.