Important: requesting DLNA technology information.

[Nesh]

Ok this is probably one of the most serious threads I ve ever made.

This is important for a research me and my team is considering doing on the DLNA technology for our Entrepreneurship course at the University.

I am currently interested on the costs and specifically the needed components for a DLNA enabled device, in order to receive the information and show the movie/audio/image files on a display ex: a tv.

What kind of components does such a device need assuming that the only thing it does is stream your media from your PC to your TV?

Any information will be greatly appreciated

 

[pcchen]

Disclaimer: I am no expert in this field. Please take my post with a mountain of salts.


From what I understand, there are some basic components you'll need: a CPU, some memory, a network interface (wired or wireless), an audio DAC, and a video encoder (for output to tv). You may want to use a video/audio decoder chip, too.

CPU and memory are the simple ones. Basically you can use a small system (ARM or PowerPC, I've seen both running DLNA servers), run Linux and you have many DLNA clients for your choice. Many basic development boards already have network and audio.

If you have a very fast CPU you can try to do decoding on the CPU, but it's almost impossible to do so if you want to support HD.

Generally you don't need permanent storage other than maybe a flash for storing the OS and applications.

 

[Nesh]

Thanks for the info. Seems kind of costy though considering the simplicity of the function I want the product to do.

Any idea where I can gather info on the cost of these components?

The product must be very cheap to produce when mass produced. So cheap that it will be easily approached by the mass casual consumer. Ignoring transportation costs, retail profits and such it must have extremely low factory prices.

When the product reaches the market, ready for the consumer to buy from the retailer it must be at around $35 or $40 at the most.

But I feel that it can not be feasible unless there are massive economies of scale opportunities to reduce greatly the average cost per unit.

 

[pcchen]

If you want to sell at US$35 to US$40 at retail, the cost must be about US$10 ~ US$15. That would be quite difficult for a DLNA device. It's impossible to do HD with this kind of cost.

To make cost this low, you probably don't want to use a separate video decoder chip. You'll want to do everything in software. A dual core ARM chip is probably fast enough to do MPEG-4 decoding depending on the clock rate. And you'll have to use normal 100Mbps ethernet. WiFi would be too expensive.

Another possibility is to look for some DVD chips. DVD players are very cheap right now and some can decode MPEG-4. The component cost should be quite low. Remove the optical drive and put in an ethernet controller and it would be very close.

 

[Nesh]

thanks. That gives a good idea of the technology. I must find a source from which I can get accurate cost information and component information.