This device specification is compliant with the Universal Plug and Play Device Architecture version 1.0 [14]. It defines a device type referred to herein as MediaRenderer.

The MediaRenderer specification defines a general-purpose device template that can be used to instantiate any Consumer Electronics (CE) device that is capable of rendering AV content from the home network. It exposes a set of rendering controls in which a control point can control how the specified AV content is rendered. This includes controlling various rendering features such as brightness, contrast, volume, etc.

Example instances of a MediaRenderer include traditional devices such as TVs and stereo systems. Some more contemporary examples include digital devices such as MP3 players and Electronic Picture Frames (EPFs). Although most of these examples typically render one specific type of content (for example, a TV typically renders video content), a MediaRenderer is able to support a number of different data formats and transfer protocols. For example, a sophisticated implementation of a TV MediaRenderer could also support MP3 data so that its speakers could be used to play MP3 audio content.

The MediaRenderer device specification is very lightweight and is easy to implement on low-resource devices such as an MP3 player. However, it can also be used to expose the high-end capabilities of devices such as a PC.

A full-featured MediaRenderer exposes the following capabilities:

The MediaRenderer DOES not enable control points to:

The un-shaded blocks represent the UPnP services that are contained by a MediaRenderer. The shaded blocks represent various device-specific modules that the UPnP services might interact with. However, the internal architecture of a MediaRenderer device is vendor specific.