Get to grips with standardised technology

Sometimes, it seems, you can’t move for gadgets designed to let you share content on your home network, with streamers, network-attached storage (Nas) appliances and even mobile phones boasting that they’ll let us access our music, data and movies any time, anywhere.

The harsh reality is somewhat different. There’s a wealth of different standards involved, and even when you have two devices that have the same logos, there’s no real guarantee that they’ll do what you want.

Take a network with a couple of UPnP (Universal Plug and Play) media players, for example, the Pinnacle Soundbridge, and the Helios X5000, plus a Mac with iTunes, a Nas server with UPnP, and a Nokia N95 phone, which also boasts UPnP support. Both the Soundbridge and the X5000 can play back music from the Nas server. They can browse music on the N95 too, if it’s set up to share it on the home network.

But they can’t browse the iTunes library on the Mac, unless the Firefly server software is added. And the Nokia phone can browse the network to see files on the Nas device, or the Firefly music server ­ – but it can’t actually play anything from them. It can, however, send a stream to be played on the Soundbridge, even allowing you to use the phone’s volume control to change the level on the Soundbridge.

But it can’t do the same trick with the X5000. And all that’s before we’ve added a few more so-called standards into the mix.

Alphabet soup
Standards are supposed to make life easier; and in some areas they do ­ – buy a bit of wireless kit with the Wifi logo on it, that has an 802.11g sticker, and it’ll connect to any Wifi network with the same standard.

The theory behind UPnP media devices is the same ­ – but just as wireless users can sometimes find that it’s the details, such as encryption support, that stop two supposedly compatible devices from working perfectly together, so the world of home networking is full of potential pitfalls. So, what standards are you likely to come across in your quest for a networked digital home, and what do they all mean?

In this article, we’ll concentrate on the area of home entertainment and media, and related systems that work with them ­ – we won’t go into home automation, for example. When it comes to devices that serve up or play back content, UPnP and DLNA are acronyms you’re going to hear a lot about.

Rather than being specifically about media, UPnP is a way for devices to configure themselves automatically (or be configured by another application) on your network; it even allows, for example, for a gadget to request that your router open specific firewall ports.

But it’s also important in terms of home media because one part of it ­ – UPnP AV ­ – defines types of devices, such as media servers, media controllers and media ‘renderers’ ­ – playback devices ­ – and how they discover each other on the network. As we saw in our example right at the start though, that’s not necessarily enough to make sure everything works together.

Although UPnP AV goes far enough to ensure that, in our example, we could send music from our N95 to a Soundbridge music player, there are still gaps. And it’s those gaps that DLNA ­ – Digital Living Network Alliance – bridges.

If you are shopping for home media equipment at the moment, and want to be sure of the best compatibility, it’s probably the DLNA-certified logo that you should be watching out for. You will even see it on PCs and laptops these days, so it’s not just for ‘brown’ goods.

A DLNA-certified product has to include UPnP support, which takes care of devices being able to find each other on the network, but in addition, it specifies certain file formats that need to be supported too, and that if a device is trying to send information to another one that doesn’t understand the format, it will transcode it.