"Meanwhile Apple Airplay is not getting remotely enough attention"
Better than Airplay is DLNA.... a standard that is implemented by most modern net-connected TVs that I've seen. It still boggles my mind that I have to download an Android app to use DLNA on my Galaxy Nexus.
DLNA is sadly such a mess. I really wish it worked, I have my Windows 7 PC and I have my DLNA media server and I have a DLNA TV and I have a phone that does DLNA.
You'd think my home would be full of interconnected multimedia, but it just. never. works. Seriously, I would pay a big amount of money to someone who just made a series of DLNA products that implemented the standard in meaning not just lip service.
Weird. I've had great success with DLNA and my Samsung TV. I had an HTC Thunderbolt and it was ridiculously seamless to play stuff on the TV. The Nexus, not so much.
Either way -- if the Q had been DLNA, wouldn't that have been better than what it's trying to do now?
foobar2000 + foo_upnp, BubbleUPnP on Android, XBMC, and PS3 Media Server have all worked fantastically for me in the past. Windows Media Player and my TV's built-in UPnP support, not so much.
I have been trying to make uPNP A/V and DLNA work for years without success. From an early Philips Streamium, to an XBox 360, and now a Sony NS400--none have had acceptable results for me. Right now my biggest annoyance is that none of the iOS DLNA controller apps I can find will play music continuously without being constantly on and in the foreground. I think this traces back to the fact that DLNA renderers are stateless and have no concept of a playlist, so as soon as a song stops the controller must be waiting for the event and ready to send the command to play the next song (this also explains why I've never heard gapless playback with DLNA either). If the controller is powered off, asleep, etc. then the music stops.
Nice! I was hoping somebody would make a remotely controlled DLNA controller to fix these issues. Just setup BubbleUPnP and it seems to work with PlugPlayer on my ipad--most importantly music actually continues even when the ipad is asleep. For some reason I don't have volume control or the ability to pause (but can stop), but at least I can listen to an album and browse the web. It's pretty sad that DLNA alone completely fails at this task.
This OpenHome is interesting, there's a lot of stuff going on here! An OS to host Web UI's for controlling a network stack... whoa, there's a lot here.
There are a lot of AV components, listed at http://openhome.org/wiki/OhMedia . Multiroom and party-mode synchronized audio are there too.
As an enthusiast, I agree, DLNA is a good idea with many real-world working implementations. But it's also been out in some capacity for just about a decade while garnering no real tech cachet, no real customer awareness, comes with a meaningless acronym for a brand name, doesn't work out of the box in too many situations, and has no standard UI. The threshhold for user frustration is incredibly low for successful consumer gear and getting lower.
Airplay works out of the box every time, with minimal training, no setup, and no discovery drama. One concept, one button, one set of expected results.
True, though if I were the "music czar" at Apple, I'd integrate Remote.app into Music on iOS (preferably replacing the Music interface with Remote's, at least on iPad, though admittedly this is a matter of taste) and add Remote client support to iTunes on the desktop.
My mom still has trouble understanding the difference between playing music on Mac iTunes via Remote from her iPod touch, and playing the same music, through the same AirPlay speakers, from the same(ish) library, via iTunes Match, and in principle, she shouldn't have to (this is admittedly tricky to get right for corner cases, but in the common scenario where desktops running iTunes never vanish and all songs are assumed to be in iTunes Match, there should be some simple logic to optimize the mechanism given only "song" and "speakers", to avoid stuffing an iDevice with music from Match and draining its battery when all the music required is already available locally on a Mac running iTunes or even via iTunes Match from an AC-powered device like Apple TV).
DLNA is useless. Or at least every implementation I have seen is. Far too little control over how the media is structured (menus, cover sheets etc.); no support for serving up formats like DVD VOB's or ISO images etc. I kept looking for solutions for my home media setup on the assumption that surely since it's specifically designed for media serving, it ought to do it better than having my set top box talk to my Samba server, but no.
Better than Airplay is DLNA.... a standard that is implemented by most modern net-connected TVs that I've seen. It still boggles my mind that I have to download an Android app to use DLNA on my Galaxy Nexus.