Making Music / Video folders on FreeBSD visible on HD TV

[Graeme Dargie]

-----Original Message-----
From: owner-freebsd-questions at freebsd.org [mailto:owner-freebsd-questions at freebsd.org] On Behalf Of Arthur Chance
Sent: 14 March 2012 10:27
To: FreeBSD
Cc: Carmel
Subject: Re: Making Music / Video folders on FreeBSD visible on HD TV

On 03/13/12 19:54, Carmel wrote:
> On Tue, 13 Mar 2012 13:59:45 -0500
> Adam Vande More articulated:
>
>> Are you sure these devices aren't trying to connect to a DLNA server?  
>> Such need can be met by net/mediatomb or other port.
>
> A couple of people have replied to this thread. The Samba shares are 
> configured correctly and are visible on my Windows based PCs. I have 
> no idea if the TVs are using DLNA. I never had to configure anything, 
> other than sharing the folders, on my Microsoft PCs, so am I to assume 
> that DLNA is always available on that OS? Anyway, I will try your 
> suggestion.

I have a Sony networked TV, and it definitely needs a DLNA server and is very picky about what formats are served. I'm not a Windows user but I have the impression Home or Home Premium versions of Vista/Win7 have DLNA support built in.

Alexander Leidinger has written a couple of blog posts on getting Sony TVs working with FBSD. Take a look at this and the related posts:

http://www.leidinger.net/blog/2011/09/15/sony-bravia-tv-dlna-formats/
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I would have to disagree with some of the stuff in that blog, all be it I have a Bravia 5810 rather than a 5800 where he states that you cannot stream HD formats in PAL I would disagree, I am using different software as well but it does happily steam HD 720 and 1080 in PAL. IIRC Sony UK now officially recommend Serviio as a steaming solution for their products. I used to use ushare which worked great with the xbox 360 but the TV would not go near it and I wanted a solution that did not require extra machines to be on to use, hence not going down the Windows media player router, that and it was never happy if the media was remote.  I really did spend close to a year looking for a solution, and I even asked on the list if anyone knew of anything, the key is not so much in the DLNA support but in the media transcoding, for Sony you need something that will take your xvid / divx / mkv file and convert that in real time to a MPEG2 stream which the TV will then display.

Regards

Graeme