Proposer: Benjamin Zores

Summary: Extend the DLNA specifications

Description: DLNA has become a de-facto standard for multimedia content access among Home consumers devices (TVs, NAS, SetTopBox ...).

Based on UPnP A/V specifications, the DLNA ones however limit its potential to only a very small subset of multimedia files.
As a result, many files aren't natively "DLNA-compliant" (while perfectly valid and playable) and require the server to transcode
A/V streams to be streamed. This is actually quite impossible on
embedded devices due to the impressive required CPU processing resources. See [1] for more details.

The idea is to get involved with DLNA Alliance to extend the existing specifications to support more profiles, mainly:
- Microsoft AVI container [2]
- Matroska (MKV) container [3]
- Ogg container and Vorbis audio codec [4]
- FLAC audio codec [5]

The project requires no development but specifications redaction and
companies support fro being accepted by DLNA Alliance members.

Related work:
* libdlna, reference DLNA implementation [6]

Scope:
This should probably take up to 2 months of writting efforts and much more for lobbying.


[1] http://gxben.wordpress.com/2008/08/24/why-do-i-hate-dlna-protocol-so-much/
[2] http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa451196.aspx
[3] http://www.matroska.org/
[4] http://www.xiph.org/
[5] http://flac.sourceforge.net/
[6] http://libdlna.geexbox.org/

Benjamin Zores wrote:

Proposer: Benjamin Zores

Summary: Extend the DLNA specifications

...

The idea is to get involved with DLNA Alliance to extend the existing
specifications to support more profiles, mainly:
- Microsoft AVI container [2]
- Matroska (MKV) container [3]
- Ogg container and Vorbis audio codec [4]
- FLAC audio codec [5]

The project requires no development but specifications redaction and
companies support fro being accepted by DLNA Alliance members.

This was discussed at the last OSS DLNA mini-summit, in 2008.
Attendees decided it would be good, but actual progress getting
something put together to submit to DLNA was missing.

However, we can revisit the issue. I've saved this as a project
proposal idea at:
http://elinux.org/CELF_Project_Proposal/Extend_DLNA_specifications
-- Tim

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Tim Bird
Architecture Group Chair, CE Linux Forum
Senior Staff Engineer, Sony Corporation of America
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