What's the difference between UPnP AV and DLNA?

upnp dlna
Aaron picture Aaron · Dec 1, 2010 · Viewed 11.9k times · Source

Am I right in thinking that if I'm DLNA 1.5 compliant, I've implemented UPnP AV? What does DLNA get me besides specifying minimum format requirements? Isn't DLNA built on top of UPnP? I know for sure that DLNA device discovery is completely based on SSDP (UPnP's device discovery protocol). Does DLNA add something in the content discovery or content delivery specification?

For example, Boxee and XBMC both support UPnP - don't they work with all DLNA devices?

Answer

antitalented picture antitalented · Dec 6, 2012

Looking at the DLNA and UPnP whitepapers,

  1. UPnP and DLNA are different although they look to solve similar problems
  2. DLNA adopts very specific things from UPnP (see DLNA whitepaper page 5). It's incorrect to say DLNA is a subset of UPnP.
  3. A DLNA device will be able to discover a UPnP server but might not be able to do anything more if both the sides don't agree to an AV format. I haven't verified this. It's more of what I understand after reading the papers.

Looking at this, it seems like the XBMC server does not support DLNA. That would explain the above situation.

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