CELF Project Proposal/Extend DLNA specifications


 * Summary : Extend the DLNA specifications


 * Proposer : Benjamin Zores

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 http://gxben.wordpress.com/2008/08/24/why-do-i-hate-dlna-protocol-so-much/ 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
 * Matroska (MKV) container
 * Ogg container and Vorbis audio codec
 * FLAC audio codec

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

Related work

 * libdlna, reference DLNA implementation - http://libdlna.geexbox.org/

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

Comments
Tim Bird wrote: 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.