Absolutely, I'm not sure that I sufficiently covered in the post on DLNA specifically that... a lot of DLNA implementations sucked. Windows Media Center had a pretty high level of polish, but it was sort of surprisingly limited in terms of features and the original, XP-era implementation was such that it felt awkwardly disconnected from the normal operating system (I think launching WMC caused the session host to start a whole new shell session?). Basically every other DLNA implementation was a mess in some way or another. I've owned around three devices with DLNA browsers/renderers over the years and all three have had serious stability or UX problems.
And this is all sort of beside the fact that Microsoft's incomplete implementation lead to Twonky and Plex as competitors, both of which had their own problems and sort of muddied the waters on the whole thing. The HP Home Servers shipped with WMC, Plex, and Twonky all running by default! You can imagine how confusing that could be to deal with.
It's hard to say why exactly this was, other than that I think Microsoft sort of heavily pushed DLNA support in embedded devices like HD-DVD and Blu-Ray players but there was no real quality enforcement, so a lot of vendors put in a token effort. The fact that the DLNA spec was relatively complex is presumably another reason, and lead to a lot of rework of the same ideas over the following years.
> And this is all sort of beside the fact that Microsoft's incomplete implementation lead to Twonky and Plex as competitors, both of which had their own problems and sort of muddied the waters on the whole thing. The HP Home Servers shipped with WMC, Plex, and Twonky all running by default! You can imagine how confusing that could be to deal with.
I haven't looked into twonky and plex, but are they even trying to solve the same problem that DLNA aimed to do? My understanding is that neither of those have submitted anything to standardizing bodies like IETF or ISO so far, but maybe there is no need for such as the content is being streamed directly from the internet.
My general understanding is that Twonky Media was originally developed specifically to be a DLNA-compliant solution. Plex was not, but had DLNA support added as a bolt-on feature to the server. Plex had better UX than Twonky but I don't think any of the Plex clients ever functioned as controllers, so Plex wasn't quite "real" DLNA in the sense that Twonky was, it was more of like a compatibility solution to allow embedded DLNA clients to access your media in Plex (I believe this still works but... don't have any DLNA clients around, so who knows). Twonky was "first-class" DLNA but never felt very high quality and didn't survive to the modern era.
While UPnP was accepted as an ISO standard and by extension DLNA was very ISO-standards based, I think the ISO angle tends to be a distraction... the meaningful authority on DLNA, including the specifications and certification, was always the DLNA incorporation itself (a non-profit partnership of its promoters). Many DLNA implementations predated ISO acceptance of UPnP A/V on which its based, and the way to get the specifications was not by paying a hefty sum to ISO but by paying an even heftier sum (membership dues) to DLNA Inc. So DLNA was an "open standard" compared to e.g. Plex that does not intend to be a multi-vendor ecosystem, but it was not as "open" as you would hope which was no doubt a factor in its limited adoption... some device vendors like Logitech and Sony bet on it pretty heavily in hardware products but it probably would have seen more of a software ecosystem if the specs were easier to obtain.
This is of course not dissimilar to many other "open standards" like USB (controlled far more by USB-IF than by any other standards body). Of course USB versions are typically submitted to general standards bodies like IEC, but when there's already a domain-specific organization promulgating standards usually the only reason it gets submitted to general standards bodies is for compliance purposes, e.g. it's not unusual for government customers to require that things be standardized through ISO (which is basically the origin story of POSIX). In the case of USB I think IEC acceptance is mostly driven by safety regulations in some countries that require electrical interconnects to be approved by a recognized standards body. I'm far from an expert in this field, this is just what I've observed about the interaction between implementation groups and general standards bodies.
And this is all sort of beside the fact that Microsoft's incomplete implementation lead to Twonky and Plex as competitors, both of which had their own problems and sort of muddied the waters on the whole thing. The HP Home Servers shipped with WMC, Plex, and Twonky all running by default! You can imagine how confusing that could be to deal with.
It's hard to say why exactly this was, other than that I think Microsoft sort of heavily pushed DLNA support in embedded devices like HD-DVD and Blu-Ray players but there was no real quality enforcement, so a lot of vendors put in a token effort. The fact that the DLNA spec was relatively complex is presumably another reason, and lead to a lot of rework of the same ideas over the following years.