I've finally got DLNA running between my TV and my computers. And it was a pain in the posterior to set up. Not from the TV side of the world, but both the Windows and McAfee firewalls were real problems. I ended up having to disable McAfee's firewall in favor of the Windows firewall, reset that to all the defaults, and then set up the media server. Plus you've got to manually enable uPnP if it's not already enabled. And if you've got anything running through wireless, then you've also got to enable uPnP and Filter Multicast on the wireless router.

And now having gone through all of that, I'm happy with being able to view my stuff on the HDTV without having to put it on separate media.

I'm curious now; how many other out there are using DLNA?

Dave, just to extend my own knowledge, what is DLNA, I have used my PS3 for this for a couple of years now but DLNA was something unknown for me.

Tomas 

Digital Living Network Allinace.  I googled it and you can read about it at wikipedia.com.  It was a new one to me also.

Denny

 

Tomas,

You've been using DLNA all along then. This is how the PS3 communicates with your PCs.

Thanks Denny, as always, google is our friend, DLNA seems to be what I have been using for the last years if i understand it correct, I am sharing my computers to my PS3 using the function from within wmp11 for sharing media, it shows up as a virtual server on my system.

The Digital Living Network Alliance (DLNA) is a set of standards for streaming media in a home network. A lot of the new TVs, DVD and BluRay players, gaming consoles etc. are all equipped as either DLNA servers and/or clients. Windows Media Player 12 (and I think 11) can act as a DLNA server. Windows Media Center comes with a DLNA server, and there are public domain ones as well (I'm using the Samsung software that came with my TV under XP).

The idea was this is supposed to be a Plug-and-Play network for watching media on things like Networked Attached Storage (NAS). When using Windows it's not necessarily P&P (and in fact it took me several days to get it all working).

Tomas,

What kind of media can you play over the PS3? I can get WMV, MOV, and AVI but not MPEG-2 based media to play on my TV. Some servers can transcode on-the-fly from unsupported media. I suspect your PS3 has no problems with MPEG-2 streams.

Mpeg-2 streams works well however 25 mbps is to fast for my wlan and I dont want cables in my living room.

What we prefer to watch is my wmv files holding them at a speed below 4 mbps when I encode them, my friends uses to have interactive viewing when they are visiting me, taking control over the remote control themselves. 

I thought of the possibility to connect a cable to be able to watch real hd but we are using my bd discs for that instead

DStone:

 Windows Media Player 12 (and I think 11) can act as a DLNA server.

Yes, this came with wmp 11

It turns out my TV does play MPEG-2. It's very particular about naming conventions, and that was the problem (you have to rename files with .m2t extensions to .ts). Interestingly enough, one of the things it can't play is DV (either as .DIF or encoded in a .AVI). So none of my files output natively from Liquid will play. I though that made sense as all the other CODECs supported are things like H.264 and WMV and DivX, except it will support M-JPEGs encoded in .AVIs and those can have a higher bandwidth than DV.

Now I have to go looking for a better DLNA server. There are some good free ones out there, and I don't like Samsung's very much.

Dave, as you mentioned wmp 12, I did a little test and changed to my w7 bootdisc, worked of course excellent, I played some H264 hd files that I have created from MC qt refs with Squeeze

I've looked at some of the freeware servers, and according to reviews on the web they're supposed to be pretty good, but I couldn't get any of them to work properly. When running my TV sees the files, but all the video is marked as unplayable, even the stuff that I can play using Samsung's server. It's not a problem with proprietary software either. It's definitely the servers not serving up the files the right way. One of my systems runs WMP 9 and I don't want to upgrade that one, so I can't even try the WMP server for it. It does work from a laptop running Vista.

 

I have a friend who has been fighting with a Samsung 52A750's DLNA link for several months now, and he's not impressed.  In that model (no idea if it's the same in yours), Samsung did a very basic, minimum-spec DLNA client that simply won't play back some of his video files over the network, server notwithstanding --  even the DLNA server that Samsung ships won't let the TV play back these files.  However, take the same file, punch it down to a USB stick, and cram it into the side of the TV, and it'll play back flawlessly.  So...he can either transcode the files to play 'em back using his TV, or he play 'em back on his PS3 as-is.  Guess which one he picked?

As for me, I'd rather my next TV support UPnP -- at least then it'd have half a chance of playing back the same set of files over the network than it can play from a media stick.

BittMann

The A series TV is 2008. I''ve a B series (2009). DLNA runs on top of uPnP, and the minimum spec. is (supposed to be) fully uPnP compliant. One thing that I found is that the TV and/or Samsung server is very specific about filenames and extensions. As I mentioned below, it would'n't accept .M2T for a transport stream, only .TS. It will accept .M2T on the USB stick.

I'm 99% sure that this is a server problem. The server is responsible for figuring out the media type and making an appropriate MIME header. If it sends the wrong header then the TV can't play the media. The Samsung server just looks at the file extensions to determine the content. I'm not even sure if for .AVI that it looks at the descriptor in the .AVI.

 

I remember when PnP was a transistor! Hard to keep up with all the alphabet stew nowadays!

DStone:

 One of my systems runs WMP 9 and I don't want to upgrade that one, so I can't even try the WMP server for it.

You only need wmp 11 ( or 12 ) installed on one of of the computers on your home Lan Dave, you use that one as your virtual media server.

From that one, you can add the folders you want to from all your other machines for sharing.

It's not always that simple. I sometimes run a segmented network for network software development and testing. It's easier to run multiple servers and let the TV see whatever it sees on whichever segment it sits at the time. The problem is one of router configuration and multicasting across network domains. It can be done, but it's a pain to set up.

Besides, I'm not fond of WMP Although, unlike some of the other DLNA servers I've tried, it at least works as advertised.

I finally got TVersity to work. And I have to say, I'm pretty disappointed in the uPnP and DLNA architectures. The whole idea was to have a Plug-and-Play network, and that's simply not how it turned out. While there is a minimum set of standards that everyone has to follow, adhering to the minimum is pretty much not that useful. There's a fair amount of optional things that vendors can (and do) support, as well as vendor specific features. To really take full advantage of DLNA requires that the DLNA media server have inherent knowledge about all the other DLNA devices it serves.

The reason TVersity wasn't working initially is that it needed a customized profile for the Samsung TV. Once I found that (in the TVersity forums), I was able to stream media to the TV. But I can't use the Fast Forward/Rewind/Pause buttons with either TVersity or Samsung's own DLNA server. So that rather limits the usefulness right there. I'm still working on that one.

My favorite part of the spec's is that A/V transmission happens completely outside of the uPnP and DLNA architecture (what they call "Out Of Band"). The media server has to negotiate with the media renderers (e.g. the TV) how they will communicate. So you can make a server that can talk with a renderer (because that's part of the standard) but have no way to stream media to it (of course, everyone will support streaming over the LAN, so that's not likely to happen). The idea behind Out Of Band data is that if the server were connected to the renderer via something like Firewire, they could negotiate to use that rather than the network. It also means that most 3rd pary server will never do so.