Saturday, January 5, 2019

Streaming media in your home challenges in 2019 - DLNA, DIAL, APPs, XML woes

Media Types

There are many types of media you'd want to stream to a display device, but it mostly boils down to these 5 broad categories:
  • Netflix, Amazon-Video, and other subscription based VOD services
  • Youtube, Vimeo, and many others like them, free/ad-supported
  • Live TV, maybe using a subscription card, and then usually a dedicated decoder device
  • Other live sources, surveillance cams, web cams, desktop streams, video conferences
  • Stored content on devices in your own network and/or under your control, or neither.
They each come with a set of characteristics and (associated) challenges:

Subscription based VOD services

  • Some of your display devices may have a dedicated app for that.
  • Some combinations of browsers/OSs/platform/etc can play in the browser.
  • Content selection on the various platforms differs, and getting worse
  • External streaming services, etc.mostly out of your control.
  • internal sources
    • Live sources with control over the output formats/protocols
    • Live sources with less or no control over the output
    • Stored content on devices capable of transcoding (format/codec changes)

(more to come soon)

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