[Fester]

My Samsung Galaxy S + one of Samsung TV nearby is playing it exactly like that by using much more user friendly protocol stack. Meet UPnP/DLNA. Moreover, right now I am watching a quaterfinal of Heineken Cup by magically streaming video to the TV over the local network. Meet UPnP/DLNA once again.

And there's more! This December I spent a week in Samsung's R&D working with their extension of UPnP that will deliver custom user interfaces for the TVs. They will be like regular javascript enabled web pages with an access to TV's media playing capabilities. No Apple, still.

So I beg you, Apple fans, try to take a broader look before shouting out loud about new killer features 'invented' by Apple.

[nickpp]

I tried to use UPnP/DLNA to watch videos from my PC on my PS3. After having to search online how to turn it on, I STILL can't get them vids to stream in HD. Only some blocky low-res crap. Streaming MKVs did not work either.

Maybe it's better on Samsung/Samsung combos. It's a great idea, though.

[Fester]

At the moment I am using Minidlna to serve videos and it works like a charm, even with big resolutions. While trying to find a way to deliver stream to the TV from under Mediatomb, it was required to specify some magical header value. Also DLNA players I worked with were extremely picky about the content type you specify. I.e. sending FullHD .ts stream won't work well unless you say it's video/mpeg.

Anyhow, at the moment opensource is only starting to be curious about something other then writing code and compiling it. Too bad they are doing new stuff kind of wrong (see KDE4 and Gnome3, my two major reasons to use Fluxbox).

[teilo]

Sorry, but I've tried to use that crap. It is a real PITA to get working, and it stops working for no apparent reason. The implementations are all over the map. Interoperability is horrible. Also, it doesn't have a standard way to just automatically start a video playing from a local to a remote device. It pulls. It doesn't push. So whatever Samsung does to achieve AirPlay-like functionality won't be standard.

[Fester]

Bullshit. Try reading something on the topic before writing. Even Wikipedia will do. DLNA specs groups devices in categories, including servers, renderers, and controllers. Using DMC you can command DMR to play a media from a DMS.

The fact that you've used loosy implementation doesn't mean that the spec itself is a crap.

DLNA is not a silver bullet and has some flaws, but it is thousand times better then AirPlay just because it is more open and does not require specific hardware to accomplish simple tasks. And what is even more important, at the moment huge amount of work is being done worldwide to enrich the list of devices supporting these protocols.

[teilo]

Right, so my only mistake was "It pulls. It doesn't push". In the future it might all get better. Great. But I was responding to what we have now, not what we might have next year.

[brigade]

UPnP/DLNA isn't user-friendly by any definition. Nor is it developer-friendly even.

It is open though, so...

[Fester]

I can't really get how can you speak about UPnP being 'user friendly'? Have you ever tried to think about the same aspect of HTTP or TCP?

Can you please explain what do you mean?