I have plex that gives me that "anywhere in the world" luxury but the interface and ability to customize is lacking. Looking around this was the best UI I could find but having it control playback of the NAS and stream to my chromecast has been a challenge thus far. I have the plugin that spawned this thread but am not knowledgeable enough to know if it's taxing my CPU in a bad way. I just don't want to end up damaging my hardware and efficiency if that's what this plugin means.
You'll know it's over taxing your CPU when your computer slows down and becomes unresponsive, the fan can't keep up with the heat, and it shuts down for self-protection. That happened to me with the plugin while I was out walking. It never shut down while I was sitting here, but it did go out of control without being in use a couple of times.
The problem isn't with the plug-in per se. The plug-in, I'm sure, is fine and written to spec. The problem is with all the other DLNA aware devices on your network that are not written to spec in an attempt to "improve" or expand DLNA. They make weird requests to the server or use it in unpredictable ways, sometimes even when you're not streaming anything. There are probably as many variations in the implementation of DLNA as there are devices that try to use it, and because it seems that no two devices handled things in the same way, it became impossible for Steven to account for all the different things that can happen while programming the plug-in. So he moved on to other things, left the plug-in out there for people that would find it useful, and put the plug-in code out publicly for anyone else to take a shot at if they wanted. So far, there have been no takers. That's the way I understand it, anyway.
So if all of your DLNA aware receivers and TVs and apps play well with the plug-in, you'll be able to use it without difficulty. If you have a DLNA device that tries to do something that puts the plug-in into a loop that causes it to overtax your system, you will use it with great difficulty or disable it. There's no way to know which scenario will apply until you try to use it.