Will Sage work with DNLA ?

[Ken C]

The new Samsung LCD HDTV I am soon to purchase has a feature called DNLA (Digital Living Network Alliance),

http://www.dlna.org/home

DNLA basically connects a media server to the HDTV via a LAN.

Has anyone heard if Sage will support this ? I would guess the connection part would be straightforward, but support for the various STV's and such might be problematic.

[S_M_E]

Originally Posted by Ken C

The new Samsung LCD HDTV I am soon to purchase has a feature called DNLA (Digital Living Network Alliance),

http://www.dlna.org/home

DNLA basically connects a media server to the HDTV via a LAN.

Has anyone heard if Sage will support this ? I would guess the connection part would be straightforward, but support for the various STV's and such might be problematic.

Why would it? Sage is, basically, is it's own media server using imported directories so any client or extender would have access to shared files already. DNLA support seems rather redundant and potentially problematic for Sage while potentially adding costs for DNLA certification...

[stanger89]

No, Sage is not a NLNA server.

[fidget]

Originally Posted by Ken C

The new Samsung LCD HDTV I am soon to purchase has a feature called DNLA (Digital Living Network Alliance),

http://www.dlna.org/home

DNLA basically connects a media server to the HDTV via a LAN.

Has anyone heard if Sage will support this ? I would guess the connection part would be straightforward, but support for the various STV's and such might be problematic.

You could purchase a DLNA server to run on your SageTV PC, but there are many things that DLNA just won't do, like serve DVDs. I would recommend going with a SageTV HD extender. It is just a more flexible solution (IMHO).

[Ken C]

I was thinking of the HDTV acting like an HD200. Keep Sage as the media server, just have Sage feed the DNLA HDTV. Of course, the STV's and STVi's would still have to function, not giving up commercial skip anytime soon.

[S_M_E]

Originally Posted by Ken C

I was thinking of the HDTV acting like an HD200. Keep Sage as the media server, just have Sage feed the DNLA HDTV. Of course, the STV's and STVi's would still have to function, not giving up commercial skip anytime soon.

Then Sage would sell less HD200s and it would require the TV manufactures to support Sage. I just don't think it's realistic.

[paulbeers]

Originally Posted by S_M_E

Then Sage would sell less HD200s and it would require the TV manufactures to support Sage. I just don't think it's realistic.

I think it could be realistic IF DLNA was included in all new televisions and/or was truly the defacto choice for local network based content. In these two cases, Sage would have to support DLNA if for no reason than to be a viable company. With that being said, I don't see this anytime soon. Most people don't even feed their HD televisions with HD content, so I can't see the majority of home owners feeding content to their tv from the family pc (or else where for that matter).

Right now we are better off not spending the extra dough on buying a televison with DLNA (if everything else being equal) and spending it on an HD200.

[Ken C]

According to the DNLA web site, over 250 companies have signed up, including Sony. So, DNLA might be something to keep an eye on.

I'll stick with the HD200. (And the HD100 and the MVP).

But, it would be nice to 'plug & play'.

[S_M_E]

Originally Posted by Ken C

According to the DNLA web site, over 250 companies have signed up, including Sony. So, DNLA might be something to keep an eye on.

I'll stick with the HD200. (And the HD100 and the MVP).

But, it would be nice to 'plug & play'.

You could run your Sage server on WHS and get WHS to support DNLA (without the Sage UI) but I'm not so sure it'll be widely adopted.

http://social.microsoft.com/Forums/e...6-d7b38507be8d

[Slipshod]

A DLNA server would be mildly interesting in being able to support a wider variety of clients, particularly mobile/wireless ones like Archos, IPhone, and Netbooks, and similar products. You can get close with Music and Photo using a 3rd-party DLNA server, but it's a real pain to navigate hundreds of TV shows without a folder structure.

What I'd *REALLY* like to see is a DLNA client built-in to the Sage server so we could use Play-On (or other DLNA servers) to proxy for services we can't normally get on an Extender, like Hulu and Netflix.

[inlvnv]

My Samsung LN52A750 is networked and plays media contents on my WHS system, as long as Samsung's PC Share Manager program is installed and running, and also will play some contents through PlayOn. Samsung's screwed up menu system, however, renders accessing media almost worthless. It is far, far better choice hooking up a HD100/HD200 to your TV. HD100/200 also upconverts, so, quality of movies look great, even better than when playing through my laptop hooked to the TV with HDMI hookup.

If Samsung's TV menu structure came close to PS3 or Xbox360, I could probably probably use it more. Even PSP, hooked to PS3, has an intuitive menu structure which makes it easy and fun to access media contents on WHS and PlayOn.

[Toccata]

Inlvnv: It's interesting that you came to the same conclusion as I did regarding these DLNA enabled TV's, but for a different reason. See my thread:

http://forums.sagetv.com/forums/showthread.php?t=38192

I'm curious as to whether your Samsung suffers from the same speed problems when viewing still photos. I looked at the LN52A750 when I was shopping because it was the only TV, other than the Pioneer models, with this feature. As I'm sure you know, getting a dealer to give a pre-sale demonstration of DLNA connectivity is impossible. They claim that there is not enough interest to justify the setup.

Now that I am wiser, I must say that I am thoroughly unimpressed with DLNA. I experimented with servers running under Windows (WMP-11) and Linux (ushare and TwonkyMedia) and had problems with all of them. WMP-11, for example, will not recognize or serve .tif images, even though the TV can display them, and ushare loses its mind if it encounters Canon RAW files during the cataloging process, etc, etc, etc. That's why I'm gravitating toward SMB/CIFS based systems like SageTV. Server support is built into Windows systems and is easily added to Linux via Samba. I already have a Sonos network music player that is SMB/CIFS based and it works flawlessly.

[inlvnv]

Samsung's PC Share program has some compatibility problems with my WHS system, so it has since been uninstalled; but it didn't have problem fetching data that I saw, just slow menu navigation and structure. I guess typical first generation problems and maybe they'll make some improvements through future firmware updates. Not planning to utilize DLNA, just not worth it right now, especially when media extenders are so much easier to use.

You won't have to to worry about Sage server "losing it's mind" with raw files during the cataloging process since it's not one of the supported formats, it just ignores unsupported files. At least that's what it does with my Nikon NEF files.

[mtnwing]

DLNA is catching on. Many Sony, Samsung and LG TV's are already offering DLNA support. Windows 7 is now shipping with built in DLNA support. This will surely drive more adoption of DLNA device support. Some Samsung and Nokia phones are now even shipping with DLNA

[mickp]

This post from way back hints that Sage may have dabbled in dlna before. IIRC (didn't have time to re-read the entire thread) in addition to running Sage or and extender on a pioneer bd player there's mention of streaming dish content directly from a dish pvr. This would be the reverse of what's being suggested with Sage consuming dlna content rather than serving it. Possibly a better match for Sage and dlna.

Mick.

[Fuzzy]

A 3rd party layer COULD be developed to virtualize sage's media library and recordings into a folder structure, yb grabbing the data from the SageAPI, and serve those files to DLNA, but the folder structure would be quite deep (SageTV/Recordings/Series/Episode, etc). This would allow some sort of playback on supporting devices.. still, it would be just navigating folders and playing files... nothing even CLOSE to real Sage capabilities, and as such, I'm not sure there is THAT much demand for it. Most the developers familiar enough with sage to make this work, already use HD200's instead...

[paulbeers]

As I stated earlier. Sage will most likely not support DNLA until just about every television on the market is shipped with DNLA. It just doesn't make sense to create support for something that only a handful of their users even have. I am not buying a television with DNLA. While pay the extra costs involved for something that we do not know if it will take off? If for some reason it becomes a necessity, we will have STB's that sit next to our televisions that will give non-DNLA sets DNLA capabilities (just as STB's were created for old CRT television when we went Digital in February) and these STB's will be considerably cheaper when it becomes a necessity than buying into DNLA now (again same as Digital STB's, when they first came out they were $400+, but by the time the switch over occurred you could buy one for $40).

I am done playing the guessing game of what will be the next great electronic (been burned too many times).

[parkimar]

Doesn't the PS3 use DLNA ?

If thats true - it would be an awesome extender.

Cheers

Mark

[stuckless]

Originally Posted by Fuzzy

A 3rd party layer COULD be developed to virtualize sage's media library and recordings into a folder structure, yb grabbing the data from the SageAPI, and serve those files to DLNA, but the folder structure would be quite deep (SageTV/Recordings/Series/Episode, etc). This would allow some sort of playback on supporting devices.. still, it would be just navigating folders and playing files... nothing even CLOSE to real Sage capabilities, and as such, I'm not sure there is THAT much demand for it. Most the developers familiar enough with sage to make this work, already use HD200's instead...

Originally Posted by parkimar

Doesn't the PS3 use DLNA ?
If thats true - it would be an awesome extender.

I actually protoyped this using the ps3mediaserver application with some modifications. I was able to browse and play the files from the sage library using the PS3. It's not nearly as functionaly as a full extender, but it can be used in a room where you only want to access movies/recordings very infrequently. And, then menus are actually slow to navigate. ie, you get a list of items within a folder, but it make take several seconds before the ps3 actually makes the calls to the server to grab the thumbnails and titles. I didn't test enough to see if this was a ps3 thing, upnp thing, or a ps3mediaserver thing.

[sbherculano]

The funny thing for me about that post is that some people do not believe in the future of UPnP / DLNA.

I don't know if these will be the name of technologies in the future but I am 100% sure that the way that we'll use our media centers / htpc / NAS at home will be something like that.

You have several advantages on that, you can stream to several devices since an simple Mobile Phone to an very expensive HD TV, you can stream media that are located in your NAS or in the Internet, seamless integration, easy configuration and several others. I am an technical guy and for me there is no problem to hack a software to do the task that I want, but 99% of the people do not want to do that and these technologies will support these people.

Of course we'll see several improvements in the next months/years in that area, but I am 100% sure if SageTV would like to play an important role in the media entertainement market in the future should adopt UPnP and DLNA fully in the server and extenders.

Cheers.