Everyone says how DLNA and AirPlay are similar things. As far as I understood, this is simply not true - AirPlay lets an audio stream travel wirelessly to an AirPlay "receiver" which reproduces it, while DLNA has a "player" fetch and playback a piece of audio content residing on "server" side. In short, AirPlay is your wireless equivalent of an audio cable (apart from the endpoints, obviously), while DLNA is more like a wireless media center solution.
If I am not making myself clear:
An instance of Spotify for iPhone, or even Spotify on a Mac with AirFoil software, will happily transmit the audio stream over air to AirPort Express router connected to a pair of speakers. There are no "files" involved, it does not matter to AirPlay what is actually transmitted - it's a stream. This comes to importance because most often we will have Spotify in turn live stream its content, without having any kind of music collection (disregarding the offline playlists feature). With DLNA, it's more like a DLNA player "browses" a DLNA "server" and plays back an item, if it can decode it, that is.
My question is - can DLNA do what AirPlay does?
22 Answers
As I understand it, you say you are able to stream content (from your phone) to the Airport Express, and have it output to an amplifier. (Music in your phone -> APEX -> amp -> speakers)
DLNA can do this too. My phone is DLNA compatible, so if I had a media player (Eg : Asus O!play) connected to my amplifier, then I can stream music to the amplifier through the media player. (Music in my phone -> O!Play -> amp -> speakers)
The advantage of DLNA is that if the content is on a device on the network (Network Attached Storage, Computer, another media player, etc) that is DLNA compatible, I could stream that content to the media player and out the amplifier. (NAS/PC/O!Play/etc -> O!Play -> amp -> speakers, controlled by DLNA phone)
The Apple ecosystem can also do the above, but the source on the network must be iTunes. (iTunes -> APEX -> amp -> speakers, phone controls iTunes)
DLNA can also stream content from the network to the phone. (NAS/PC/O!Play/etc -> phone (listen on headphones?))
1It is possible to stream from a device to a dlna receiver. I can send a video using my iphone and to my samsung.
