[mANm]

That said, no matter which solution you choose I think that device interoperability and selection of formats to transcode to should be done fully automatic from the end-user perspective.

I totally agree with you. This should be the final goal and also hardware transcoding should not be forgotten. But initially (software) transcoding itself and access to it should be realized and support for UPnP, DLNA, XML-client profiles and hardware acceleration should definitively come afterwards but kept in mind during the design and implementation. Since I find it hard to estimate how much effort each of those parts will take I'll probably propose only the first two things (transcoding and browser/JSON-RPC access) to GSoC and mention the others as optional, if that's possible.

Please tell me if you wouldn't agree.

Thanks for your feedback,
Mark