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We've talked about DLNA, or Digital Living Network Alliance, several times before - on Episodes 264 and 161 both get into the nitty gritty on what it is and what it's for.  Let's just cut it short and say that it's a way for consumer electronic devices to share media content.  You've got DLNA servers that dish out content and DLNA players that play it back.  There are a ton of great options out there for DLNA players, as well as a bunch of server options.  While many of the players are top notch, we're having trouble tracking down a really good server.

Why aren't there any good DLNA servers?

As a side note, DLNA grew out of the work done by the UPnP Forum (Universal Plug and Play), so those two terms are often used interchangeably.

DLNA players
  • PS3
  • Buffalo LinkTheater products
  • HP MediaSmart TVs
  • Panasonic Blu-ray players (not all models)
  • Hitachi, Philips, Pioneer, Samsung, Sharp and Sony all make TVs with DLNA built in

DLNA Servers

Here's a nice table with a bunch of options.

What's missing?
So if you've tried any of the DLNA servers out there, you've probably seen how bare they are.  With so many consumer electronics devices supporting DLNA playback, it seems a really good DLNA server would sell like hotcakes.  Here's what we think the perfect DLNA server would do.

Support Transcoding.  Some DLNA Servers support transcoding, but not all of them.  Transcoding allows the server to change the format of the video your watching or song you're listening to to something that the player can actually play back.  Otherwise you'll get a bunch of failures trying to play back stuff like DivX and Xvid.

Support Cover Art.  Most DLNA servers will just grab a video frame out of a movie file and display it as a thumbnail.  Why not replace that with the actual cover of the movie?  They're easy to find online.  It might take a little more setup up front to get all the covers downloaded and in the right place, but it would be worth it.

Categorize videos.  A few of the servers support a limited amount of categorization for video files, but what you'd really like to do is tag a movie with a genre, a year, rating, actors, director, producer, etc. and use any of those pieces of information to find the right movie.

Built-in DVD backup.  Consumers want a way to backup their movies.  DVDs don't last forever.  Allow a user to create a backup copy of their DVD on a hard drive.  Of course they'll also be able to watch it from any network connected DLNA player, but that's just a slight benefit of the nifty backup feature.  Of course, if you could then provide the built-in...

Connection to IMDB.  Allow users to automatically populate cover art and meta data info by selecting the correct movie from an online database like IMDB.  This would greatly simplify the chore of adding movies to a video library.  While this tends to be a one-time event (once per movie at least), it can be painful and tends to wear on you after a while.

Support online sources.  Right now PlayOn is the only server we've found that supports online video sources.  It, however, doesn't support local sources.  It looks like that functionality will be coming soon, but the two ideas need to merge for a really great product.

As DLNA becomes more popular in players, the need for a really good DLNA server will just continue to grow.  Perhaps there's a DLNA server out there that already does all of this, or maybe most of it.  If so, we'd love to hear about it so we can check it out.  Send us an email if you're using DLNA to serve video content in your home media network.  What server do you use?