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Comment by mootothemax | Hacker News Reader

Sadly a better solution already exists: my 2012 Panasonic TV connects wirelessly to my network, and my laptop can stream videos to it without having to install anything, all via DLNA:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Living_Network_Alliance

Here's Panasonic's page outlining such features in their TVs:

http://www.panasonic.co.uk/html/en_GB/Products/VIERA+TV/VIER...

It's a lovely idea for retrofitting to older TVs, and sharing between laptops is really neat. For anyone who's bought a TV in the last couple of years, though, the device is redundant.

(it's also apparently very easy to share content from smartphones, tablets and so on, but I haven't had the need (or a chance) to independently play with this)

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DLNA is emphatically not a better solution, or even equivalent. The spec defines only a limited number of file types that are allowed to function. Why on earth would I want to let multinational corporations decide which file types I want to use? For instance, MKV files, which would be in the top 2-3 file formats that most of us would want to use wireless streaming for in the first place, are not supported. All Apple products are, similarly, not supported. Noncompliant file types must be transcoded.

DLNA will die an instant and painful death the moment a truly open solution is adopted.

DLNA is the solution that TV companies and PC makers came up with to keep the lid on streaming and make the viewing of pirated content more difficult.

DLNA is widely despised for the same reasons that all DRM-crippled products are always despised.

DLNA is widely despised for the same reasons that all DRM-crippled products are always despised.

I question how despised DLNA really is, as I believe you might be letting your personal prejudices get in the way.

Non-techies (and plenty of techies, including myself) just don't care as long as a given solution works, and the DLNA solution is pretty hard to beat:

Plug in your TV, connect it to the network, and click on a video on your laptop to watch.

Out of interest, what kind of open source solution do you envisage when you say that "DLNA will die an instant and painful death the moment a truly open solution is adopted"?

Would it involve hardware, or something installed on the TV, or something else entirely?

All Apple products are, similarly, not supported.

FYI, my iPhone and iPad work just fine with it.

"Out of interest, what kind of open source solution do you envisage when you say that "DLNA will die an instant and painful death the moment a truly open solution is adopted"? Would it involve hardware, or something installed on the TV, or something else entirely?"

Did you click the link? This is an example of a truly open solution, and it involves hardware.

Did you click the link? This is an example of a truly open solution, and it involves hardware.

And it wouldn't lead to me replacing my DLNA-based setup, hence my question.

I also question your description of "truly open," although that's me being a bit Stallman, granted.

Isn't Miracast the open solution that is open and supported by many?

Miracast isn't "open" - devices require certification, and the Miracast and Wi-Fi Direct specifications cost $200 each. It's also supported by relatively few devices right now (since, you know, certification), and I seem to recall there are some compatibility issues between manufacturer implementations.

While I share your opposition to all things DRM I'm sure this wifi/HDMI dongle suffers from similar limitations regarding file types.

Since the wifi stream can't be raw 1080p video it has to be re-encoded on the fly which will lead to some visual artifacts. If the encoding is well done it shouldn't be much of an issue however.

I agree on the fact that DLNA is a messed up pseudo-standard, and we should have better. Having said so, I tell you that my 2012 Panasonic TV supports mkv streamed by minidlna (running on a 20$ ARM system, so we should all agree that it's not being transcoded)

Sadly DLNA is only for sharing and streaming files. If all you want is playing movies from your laptop, it should work. If you want to play e.g. something from youtube, it will work only if you find a player that supports DLNA. If you want to play a game, it just won't work because it's not intended for it.

Second, while it looks good on paper, last time I've tried even playing movies sucked:

* it's buggy and "almost, but not really" compatible. Getting a Sony TV to see anything non-Sony took an entire evening. There were no error messages, the only feedback was "it works" vs "it hangs up for 30 seconds and then timeouts".

* Because it's build around sharing files, if you want to play a movie you need to make sure it's using a codec supported by your TV or it'll need to be transcoded it on the fly. Only some DLNA servers support transcoding, user-friendly ones and the servers built into devices often don't. Then the only video codec that works reliably with all/most devices is MPEG2 with limited bitrate. There was a small but perceptible loss in quality when playing high bit-rate x264 video.

* There's a difference between a DLNA "server" and a DLNA "controller", the "server" serves files, the "controller" is the user interface you use to select a movie to play, play/pause/stop, change volume etc. Many apps support one but not the other. If the app you put on your phone is a "dumb" DLNA server without a controller, then you can select the movies/music/pictures only by navigating the menus on your TV (which hopefully has a controller built in).

* All problems have workarounds, but these cause more problems. E.g. in the server i settled on the, transcoding data was saved to disk to a separate video file that grew and grew until i ran out of disk space. Would you know that before playing a movie you need to make sure you have 100GB of free disk space? Yes, in theory the software could hide all this from me, but it isn't there yet and it doesn't look like it ever will be.

I just want a fast way to mirror my computer screen onto the TV (wirelessly). Does DLNA support this? From the description it's not clear.

On the other hand I can clearly see that this project supports it, "Duplicate your screen" is the first feature listed there.

Does DLNA support this? From the description it's not clear.

Honestly, I've no idea; if you like I can have a play tonight when I get home and let you know?

I can clearly see that this project supports it, "Duplicate your screen" is the first feature listed there.

Hah, that's quite funny; if you skip to the "Use Cases" section, it's all about consuming media, whereas the screen mirroring is highlighted as an extra feature. I guess the page neatly segmented you and I into our respective markets!

I came up with a hack to do this. Basically I streamed my screen into a file, and then served that file with a DNLA server (which transcoded it into something the TV would eat).

The result was pretty because source -> youtube -> my screen -> mp4 -> mpeg.

Although it won't be so bad, I really see re-encoding artefacts being the problem here. Although Wireless N can have enough bandwidth to send video at a good quality.

It doesn't appear to. Everything I've seen focuses on pictures audio and videos

Chromecast has this feature, you can cast a tab or the entire screen in the beta option. I can stream a movie this way over wireless G, I imagine with a good N router there's a difference.

Chromecast is limited to 720p @ 5Mb/s. It's nowhere near HDMI quality.

DLNA doesn't work for a lot of use cases. What I want is chromecast, but without the cloud BS. TVs at this point should really just be wireless monitors. From there, I could walk into the room with my wifi device and display whatever I want on my TV. This would be especially great for tablets where both the tablet and the TV are "lean back" experiences.

I want bluetooth for displays (and high def audio and devices, etc...). I just want to walk into a room and have my phone, computer, tablet, etc. find my printer, display, mouse, and all other useful devices.

This level of convenience requires either an up-front pairing process with each individual device, or a gaping security hole that anybody with a high-gain antenna can exploit (imagine mischievous teenagers driving around neighborhoods with small kids and beaming illicit videos onto unprotected wireless TVs).

> This level of convenience requires either an up-front pairing process with each individual device

I see no issue with this. Everything I mentioned already works with bluetooth (for the most part) except for display.

You don't need to install anything, it's plug&play and open source. And can you stream to multiple tv's with that panasonic setup? And if you have multiple tv's from diferent models? A nice solution is something that doesn't rely on specific models or brands.

You don't need to install anything, it's plug&play and open source

Yes you do, on their page it says "Install our AIRTAME application on your computer..." under step 2.

And can you stream to multiple tv's with that panasonic setup. And if you have multiple tv's from diferent models?

You have the choice of which screen to stream to.

If you mean "can you stream 1 video from 1 laptop to multiple screens as the same time," then I honestly have no first-hand experience so couldn't say.

DLNA has many members, so I would presume different models and brands would work.

From the Wikipedia page I linked, the members include:

ACCESS, AT&T Labs, Awox,[12] Broadcom, CableLabs, Cisco Systems, Comcast, DIRECTV, Dolby Laboratories, DTS, Ericsson, Google, Hewlett-Packard, HTC, Huawei, Intel, LG Electronics, Microsoft, Nokia, Panasonic, Qualcomm, Samsung Electronics, Sony Electronics, Technicolor, and Verizon.

Not sure on multiple TVs, but I thought DLNA was gaining wider adoption. My brother's got a TV that's not Panasonic and it has DLNA as well, and he can stream to it.

Would be nicer to simply have a wireless standard that devices - DVD players, boxes, etc - would bundle so that we didn't needs cables to the TV box. Or... hey - maybe just wireless audio from a TV to external speakers (bluetooth 4?) to cut down on wires.

DLNA only works for a limited set of content (music/vids/pictures).

No gaming, other apps, etc.

Thanks.

Downside of wireless audio is you still need to power the speaker.

but you can often position the speakers where you want closer to power too.

Can someone suggest a dnla server to use? I have intel macs with movies on them. Ideally it would be a commandline program I could start to serve any ofthe files in a directory or in a simple to create with the output of find playlist file.

MiniDLNA works extremely well on linux, and a quick Google search shows links for how to get it working (albeit hackily) on a Mac. It might be worthwhile to run a VM on your Mac with an easy linux distro like Ubuntu to run MiniDLNA.

I use it daily on an Arch Linux server as well as occasionally threw an Ubuntu VM on Windows 7. Works seamlessly in either case, and better than most other DLNA servers I've tried in terms of file format support and reliability.

http://sourceforge.net/projects/minidlna/

Thanks:

http://reliablybroken.com/b/2010/12/running-minidlna-on-mac/

minidlna -d -f ~/minidlna.conf

with media_dir=..., this exactly what I was looking for, thanks again.

Glad to help! (also I meant "through*" in the original post, but you got the point...haha)

How can you call it a better solution? I totally don't get it.

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