DLNA/UPnP apps to cast to Smart TV

Well, my home PC is ancient, and my laptop is from work, so I can't use that to download torrents.

What do you mean by "MHL cable"? If that's the Slimport to HDM adaptor I just ordered one from eBay (should get it in about 3 weeks).

Bubble was the first one I tried. Super simple. Fired it up, clicked "Inputs" on my TV and there it was (by comparison, with XBMC took me a while to figure out I had to enable the UPnP "service").

Anyhow, with both of those, the Media Server sits there passively and you have to have your client (my TV) do all of the work at picking what to play and controlling it. I would much rather use my tablet as the controller -- I tried a couple remote controller apps for XBMC but I don't think any of them are meant to control the playback of media streamed to another client.

Then I found out about Twonky and iMediaShare (now Flipps). Both of these will discover my TV on the home wifi and initiate the playback of media to it (my girls were playing a PS3 game at the time and were quite surprised when all of a sudden it switched to the DLNA input while I was in another room).

I've mostly only played with Twonky. UI is a bit bare-bones (pause/play, volume control, 30s skip-ahead and 10s skip-back, no FFW/REW but you just drag the progress indicator) but it works. If I could figure out subtitles I'd be pretty much done.

Once the Slimport adaptor gets here I'll be able to use XBMC directly (lots and lots of features there) using the HDMI cable (too bad I'd have to set it up close to the TV; might have to use one of the remote control apps on a different device then).

I was looking for the keywords "subtitles" or "subs" or even "captions" and the only thing I found was one of the reviews which said "Buggy as hell, no subtitles support." Not very promising, I'm afraid.

There are a lot of apps that will cast/beam/whatever the content to your DLNA clients. It would take forever for me to try them all out, so I really was hoping for some first-hand experience. Or failing that, if someone can say, definitively, that you cannot stream external subtitles because the protocol doesn't support it.

Twonky streams some of the mkv files I have, but those do not have subs added to them. I should try either finding an mkv that has subtitles, or use some third party s/w to add subs to the one I have, and see if that is at least one way to get there.