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Digital Living Network Alliance: this goes with that, and that, and this...

07/10/2008 15:10:53

By Anthony Fordham

Assuming recent reader research we've done is correct, your home - like mine - is slowly filling up with awesome digital gadgetry. And as you spend more time with this stuff, you're coming to realise the true potential of it, especially when you attach it to a home network.

Gone are the crazy days of plonking a portable tape recorder in front of your hi-fi speakers and then recording your favourite vinyl album through the tape deck's miniscule microphone so you can listen to it in your Walkman. Thank goodness.

Yet even though you have the potential to watch or listen to all your entertainment in any room in the house on a variety of devices - from a massive LCD TV to a portable movie player and even your PC - actually getting your content from device to device is still quite a technical exercise.

Enter the DLNA, the Digital Living Network Alliance. By its own admission, you haven't heard of it, but you've certainly heard of most of the 245 members - including such companies as AMD, IBM, Intel, Kenwood, Lenovo, LG, Panasonic, Microsoft, Nokia, Philips... the list goes on!

The DLNA logo - an assurance that it has passed DLNA certification testing and has met all the DLNA guidelines for the device class or classes of that product. The logo is also displayed on derivative products that have been registered with and approved by DLNA as legitimate derivatives of the original DLNA Certified product

The aim of the DLNA is to vastly simplify the business of shuffling your digital content - including your business, not just entertainment - around your increasing variety of devices.

But to explain why the industry needs the DLNA, we need to look at the current reality. Let's use a case study, and let's call him Steve.
Steve is lucky enough to own a house full of sweet kit. He has a big TV with a digital media player attached to it via HDMI, he has a couple of PCs, a 1TB external hard drive full of movies and music, and a wireless router running his home network.

If Steve wants to play one of his movies on the TV in the lounge, he has to go to his PC with a USB thumbdrive, load the movie on the drive, then bring it into the lounge room, plug it into the digital media player, and hope that the format the movie has been encoded in is compatible with his player.

Meanwhile, if Steve wants to look at some of the photos he has on his external hard drive, he has to bring that into the lounge-room along with his notebook PC, and plug the PC into the TV via an analog video-out port, and the hard drive into the PC.

For a tech-head all this is pretty straightforward, but for the rest of us it's positively arcane. It's also inelegant, and digital living is supposed to be about progress and simplifying the business of being entertained.

What the DLNA aims to do is massively streamline the whole process of playing content on different devices. All a DLNA-certified setup asks of you is a wireless network and a set of approved devices.

In Steve's case, to watch his movie all he would need to do is tell his digital media player to go on the network and look for storage locations with movies in them. The player would report back with a list of places - the notebook PC, the desktop PC in the study, and even the external hard drive.

Because DLNA supports 'network addressed storage' (or NAS), hard drives don't need to be attached to a PC to work, they just need to be on the network, either via Ethernet or wireless.

Okay, you might still need to be a tech-head to set all this up in the first place, but once all the devices are communicating, it should only be about as complicated as using a cable or satellite set-top box.

Steve and Mrs Steve just grab the digital media player's remote, click through a bunch of menus on the TV, and they can watch their movie, listen to music or even browse photographs without any tedious mucking around with cables, discs or thumbdrives.

Of course, the DLNA has a long way to go. You can check out the organisation's roadmap at www.dlna.org but the days of just plugging your new toy in and it instantly going on the network and making itself available to every other device are still a little way off - though definitely looming.

The association is currently working on a single, standard protocol for streaming audio and video from any device to any other device. Mobiles and printers are also due to be added to the standard, as is all-important support for MPEG4 video: emerging as the most popular format for portable devices such as the iPhone. There are even plans to get your car in on the action: switch on your entertainment system in range of your home wireless network and update the car's hard drive for the trip ahead.

And then ultimately, you'll have access to all your digital content not just at home, but from anywhere in the world. Just log in and then browse as if you were on your very own PC.

Many people believed this decade would be all about convergence. But instead, it's emerging that we're living in the age of interoperability. There are lots of devices to choose from, each suiting a different user's style. But thanks to organisations like the DLNA, no matter whether you choose the iPhone or the Logitech Transporter, everyone can have access to the same music, movies and more!