A few DLNA Questions

[Over Carl]

Alright peeps,

I'm probably gonna be ordering a telly with dlna tomorrow so thought it's time I better start reading up, but not finding the info I'm after.

Basically I've got two main questions:

1) Is all that is needed to be dlna compliant to set everything right in wmp? If so, does the dlna sticker on my sony vaio vgn-fw21l actually mean anything?

2) I've been reading up and apparently dlna will only let you use certain video and sound types at certain resolutions and stuff, so pretty much everything will have to be re-encoded on the fly. What sort of desired specs should my pc have in order to play everything at 1080p without any drop in frame rate?

[Mr.James]

WMP is a DLNA server. It's just a streaming protocol. It doesn't mean that the DNLA device will be able to play the output of the DNLA server though which is a bit of a con. If you get something like TVersity it will detect what codecs the DNLA device can play and transcode on the fly if need be. WMP12 will apparently have this function but the Beta version of Windows 7 I have doesn't seem to do it.

My PS3 and X360 will play most of the stuff I download without issue (I use MKV2VOB to convert MKV to .MPG which play fine on PS3) and stream it from WMP12. I downloaded PMS (Playstation Media Server for PS3) which re-encodes files that don't work. However tried to see if it would re-encode and stream a 1080p/DTS MKV and it nailed my PC. I've got a dual core athlon 4400 and it stutters way too much to watch, even when it's using both cores at 100%.

Some nVidia/ATI graphics cards allow for CPU offloading so that the graphics card does the work. This should be better than using your CPU as it's optimised for video processing but it's only supported by a limited number of apps at the minute and I'm not sure if any of them are capable of streaming DLNA. I haven't checked for 6 months or so but it may be worth looking into it.

[Over Carl]

Nice one - I had a feeling you would answer.

At the moment I have choice of the following pc's to use for it

Sony laptop - core 2 duo @ 2.00 radeon 3870
Dell PC - Xeon 5430 quad core @ 2.66 quadro fx1700

Do you reckon either would do it, or shall I tell my brother I'm taking the two xeon 5405 quads @ 2.00 out of his pc and swapping with mine (and would that do it)? In case you can't tell, I don't wanna spend anything, although I have been trying to justify a gts260/280 to myself for a while now, but that would be obscene really as I don't game or edit gfx or anything.

[Over Carl]

WMP is a DLNA server. It's just a streaming protocol. It doesn't mean that the DNLA device will be able to play the output of the DNLA server though which is a bit of a con.

That is a proper joke - especially seeing how few "profiles" there are for dlna use anyway.

[Mr.James]

Anythin I can do to help

Looks like the QuadroFX graphics card should be able to offload video transcoding from the CPU via WMP with this plugin... but it's paid for only...

http://www.nvidia.com/object/purevideo_overview.html

The ATI equivalent is called Avivo but I've had a dig about and can't find anything that would be able to transcode and stream it on the fly... Give TVersity a pop though. If it works you'll have no compatibility issues. If not use the desktop...

[Over Carl]

Ok, the pioneer landed yesterday.

I tired using wmp/windows vista and I could see the files but nothing would work. Installed TVersity and it worked straight away, everything works except one film which reboots the tv. Very impressed, except that the tv doesn't seem to be able to pause/ff/rwd.

With regards to my technical concerns, I didn't get to try any decent hd downloads, but the ones I did try barely used any of my cpu power (core 2 duo @ 2.00) and happily were streaming over wifi from a crap laptop 5400rpm hd as well!.

Have to say, I'm impressed, although the client software could really do with pause/rwd/ff.

[Mr.James]

I had a few issues at first with Tversity. Make sure you set the Tversity service to run as and administrator equivalent account rather than the system account. Also I uninstalled all codecs and only installed FFDShow (decoding everything with libavcodec where possible), Haali Media Splitter and AC3Filter. This way it transcodes any files your receiving dlna can't understand into formats it can.

It may be that you're just streaming everything in it's original form and it's killing the TV. When you stream things you should see on the status screen if it's transcoding or not...

It sounds like the client software is probably the bigger pain in the A for you at the minute rather than one file though...

[Over Carl]

Luckily I had no problems at all - probably cos that laptop is mainly used by my mum, hasn't been messed about with in any kind of way. I just set TVersity, and I remember actually at first it didn't work - showed films but couldn't play, then I told it to transcode everything to 1080p and it worked perfectly (apart from that one film).

Only issue was I when I shared my mum's desktop, I renamed it to Mum, but it showed up on tv as Desktop - sure we can live with that.

Strange thing is on the status screen, most of the time it says it's been paused or cancelled or something, only see "normal" activity there for very short bursts here and there.

[Mr.James]

Mine rarely has a prob transcoding 1080p mkvs (processor sits at about 80% usage) but on the odd occasion it will stutter a little. I've got everything set to highest quality though. I'm thinking it may be a network bandwidth issue though as I've not set it to reduce the quality if the network if it isn't up to it. Either that or the PC going off and doing some task in the background like checking windows updates or something... I'm sure I could prob sort it with a couple of tweaks but it's not bothering me too much at the minute...

I'd also like to see a couple more features to like picture thumbnails and for it to prevent the computer from sleeping when a movie is being played but apart from that it's a cracking little program.