A question that is commonly asked in relation to HDTVs is – What is DLNA?
Many of the latest TVs on the market are DLNA certified. It is becoming an increasingly common standard that is used in a wide range of electrical devices including TVs, cameras, printers and mobile phones. But exactly what is DLNA technology and what is DLNA used for?
DLNA stands for ‘Digital Living Network Alliance’ and is an industry standard for sharing data using a home network. Homes that have an internet hub or wireless router provide a network which offers the ability to inter-connect a range of different devices to each other. Devices which are DLNA certified are deigned to connect to each other without incompatibility issues. The ‘alliance’ was formed in 2003, and now includes hundreds of manufactures who have adopted DLNA technology in their products thus standardising the integration of many common home digital devices. One common scenario would be connecting a TV with DLNA to a digital camera to allow the TV to display photos and movies from the camera using the network.
So what is DLNA technology and what are the requirements? Firstly any devices to be used on the network needs to be DLNA certified. Devices such as a Samsung DLNA TV will typically have this feature built in to it. DLNA is not something that you can add to a device (for example by buying an optional adaptor), it must be designed and manufactured with the feature included.
DLNA involves the transfer of data from one device to another, the device which the data is transferred from is called the ‘DLNA Server’ and device which receives the data is called the ‘DLNA Client’. For example, using the same example as above, a digital camera with DLNA would be the server which transmits the data to the client TV with DLNA.
Another common example would be to connect to the digital movies and music stored on a PC for playback on a DLNA LED TV. The PC is the server and the TV is the client. It is worth noting that MS Windows 7 includes DLNA and windows media played can act as the server for media streaming with DLNA. Also many manufactures now include DLNA server software on CD/DVD for use with their DLNA enabled TVs, so that you can create a home DLNA network.
It all sounds to good to be true, but is DLNA really this simple? In reality, with DLNA compatible devices from the same manufacture you will have few connectivity problems because they are designed to work with each other, (for example connecting a DLNA Samsung LED TV to a DLNA Samsung Camera).
But when mixing many DLNA compatible devices from more than one manufacturer, and in particular when connecting a TV to Windows you might start having problems with software compatibility or media copyright and licensing issues for music and films. Also the many different file formats that are used can cause problems, for example digital movie using the DivX format might playback on an LG DLNA TV ok but not on another brad of TV.
DLNA technology is certainly a great idea and for the majority of the time it works very well. Once configured, tasks which were previously a pain become effortless particularly when used on a wireless DLNA network (no messy network cables required). But if things do go wrong it is frustrating and can be overly-complicated for the average home user to resolve.
