International Electrotechnical Commission

Digital living network alliance (DLNA) home networked device interoperability guidelines – Part 2: DLNA media formats - Edition 1.0
 N 62481-2

Annotation

This part of IEC 62481 specifies the DLNA media format profiles applicable to IEC 62481-1. Media format profiles are defined for each of the following media classes: audio, image, and AV. In addition, profile ID values that identify media collections and printer XHTML documents are also introduced.

It is envisioned that in the home network environment, devices will be capable of exchanging content items that originate from different sources. Content items will typically come encoded in different formats. The term "format" designates the compression and encoding tools utilized to generate the binary instance of a content item, which will be eventually exchanged over the home network using streaming or file transfer protocols. Examples of formats include MPEG-2, MPEG-4, WMV and others for video; or MP3, AAC, WMA and others for audio.

Formats alone, however, include as part of their specifications, multiple parameters, features and tools which can be used in a myriad of combinations to generate content binaries. In this standard, the notion of a format profile is introduced to identify a particular suitable combination of format parameters which define a way for representing content binaries. A format like MPEG-2, for example, can have multiple profiles depending on selections for the companion audio, the system-layer multiplexing specifications, allowed frame resolutions, allowed aspect ratios, allowed bit rates, etc.

This standard provides a quasi-exhaustive list of broadly-used format profiles for image, audio, and AV formats. For each particular format profile, this standard defines a profile ID text token to be used during the DLNA media discovery and media transfer operations. The profile ID is exposed in a server's content directory service (CDS) to signal to potential networked players or renderers the existence of a content item with particular coding and compression features defined precisely by the item's profile ID. This standard also describes the uses of format profiles which define media collections and printer XHTML documents.