DLNA making improvements

We had a really good chat today with two of the senior executives of the DLNA here at CES. I was really pleased to hear that they have announced a new certification process for software and also are working on a protected streaming standard.

The first means you will soon be able to buy applications for your mobile devices that will have undergone the same sort of testing that hardware renderers and streamers have to go through.

This should mean a much higher level of compatibility than has previously been the case. In fact you should be able to expect certified software to work properly with certified hardware. As you will know from my previous posts this is not the case now and I see this as a very welcome move.

The introduction of a standard for protected content (technically dtcp-ip) should mean that DRM protected movies should in the future be streamable between DLNA compliant devices. With Microsoft being an active member of the alliance one can only hope this will mean support for protected Media Center recordings as well.

Now as this is a new feature there is no guarantee that older DLNA certified devices will support this. This begs the question how can you tell what parts of the standard a certified device will support and DLNA have an answer for this as well. If you go to www.DLNA.org you can now check the certification of any device. They also have iOS, Android and shortly Windows Phone 7 apps you can take with you to check out the compatibility of that new hardware device you were thinking of buying.

Overall it looks like DLNA have been listening and are moving in the right directions.