DLNA vs UPnP

[123]

I read that Windows 7 will support DLNA. Although that doesn't guarantee success, it goes a long way to exposing DLNA to a large audience.

A quick look DLNA seems to suggest the same benefits as UPnP. Can someone shed some light on the key differences (if any) between these two initiatives? Is DLNA just a fresh marketing face for UPnP?

 

[twilo123]

dlna is a sorry attempt at normalizing upnp. dlna is upnp with tons of restrictions. upnp shows some decent promise but dlna cuts through it with a meat cleaver in a sorry attempt at specializing it for audio/video. because a/v manufacturers are backing dlna it is getting more PR but IMO they should use upnp directly.

 

[amirm]

I read that Windows 7 will support DLNA. Although that doesn't guarantee success, it goes a long way to exposing DLNA to a large audience.

Actually, there is a DNLA server in current Windows Media Player. So you don't need to wait until Windows 7 to get that ability.

A quick look DLNA seems to suggest the same benefits as UPnP. Can someone shed some light on the key differences (if any) between these two initiatives? Is DLNA just a fresh marketing face for UPnP?

They are orthogonoal concepts. UPnP is for device discovery. You can for example, discover your sever from a client. But it does not stipulate any compatibility in audio/video streaming from it. A device compliant with DLNA will have to support a minimum A/V standard (e.g. MPEG-2 with PCM audio). That allows a client then to not only discover the server (i.e. through DLNA) but also be able to play the stream that it sends to it.

The issue with DLNA is that it is a limitted standard (doesn't support many codecs for example) and only works for content that is in the clear (i.e. not encyrpted). And the other is that the user interface for browsing is that of the client, which may be a sorry affair in case of poorly implemented user interfaces (Media Center Extender addresses this for Windows PCs).

Hope this is clear.