Samsung AllShare and Internet@TV Discussion - Page 4

I've currently got Mediaplay/Allshare rolling on my brand new Samsung LN46c630. It has been, for the most part, a fairly rewarding experience. I have played primarily .MKV files and DVD rips from Video_TS folders, with seemingly unavoidable intermittent dropouts of the DTS soundtrack. Obnoxious? Certainly....A complete and utter deal breaker? Not quite yet...I have the USB drive connected directly to the TV so I'm fairly certain the audio drops aren't a bandwidth issue, but who knows? Help greatly appreciated, but unfortunately not the impetus for the post.

I'm afraid I've already got the answer to this one, but I'll throw it out there regardless. I'm curious as to whether or not there exists any possible means of enabling subtitles within my .MKV files once connected to the TV? If not, is there anything I can do beforehand that would allow me to pre-select, so to speak, a subtitle track to be enabled and displayed from a muli-language subtitled file? Any help greatly appreciated.

oneway23 - I haven't figured out how to do it yet, but I believe it is possible, you gotta extract the subs from the mkv into a seperate srt file... but like I said havent tried it so dunno how to do it or if it really works... but I think it definitely should work on usb/disc for sure... name the subs the same as the .mkv but with .srt as the extension, once you get them out of the mkv (which I dunno how to do!)

Brit - that reminds me... on the serviio forums he said he might try to make it so his software pulls the subs out from mkv's and sends them separately somehow so the samsung sees them... did he end up doing that in the beta? (If he did, is there a way to enable/disable the subs if you dont want them, does it work with the subtitle button on the remote?)

If anyone is curious, I burned the midnight oil last night attempting to remove the subtitle files from my .MKV and place the resulting .srt file inside the folder w/ the file. The subtitles were not acknowledged by the Samsung.

Undaunted, I attempted to re-mux the file with MKVmerge, making sure to check the force track flag, hoping to coax the TV into seeing them. As the TV clearly has no means of recognizing subs, the flag was ineffective as well.

At this point, I believe I've reached the end of the line w/ this particular experiment and will most likely be springing for a NMT of some sort. Before I take the plunge, would anyone please tell me if the PCH A-200 has any particular issues whatsoever that I should be aware of with subtitle tracks from .MKVs? Thanks again...

mpeg1 video with mp2 audio doesn't work for me.

My two cents:

The Samsung PC Share software is much better than Serviio. Serviio's Java server is a pile of crap, IMHO. The redundant, overly-complex and completely non-customizable folder system they use is ridiculous and obtuse. Is there any benefit in using this over the Samsung software? I certainly haven't found one.

Features I would like in a uPNP server that the Samsung Share doesn't do:

-Customizable folder database/system that scans imdb/thetvdb for info and shows that instead of filenames. i.e. "Videos>TV Shows>Lost>Season 1>Episode 1 - Pilot" instead of whatever folder/filename structure I have on my hard drive. A good example of this is Boxee or XBMC which are supposedly servers as well, but I don't and won't run them 24x7 on my gaming PC/media server. I definitely need a background application to serve media.

-Auto-update so I don't have to refresh the server every time I add a video to the share folders.

-Online media like Hulu and YouTube (Investigating PlayOn for this soon)

-The ability to jump ahead more than the 1min or so it does when pushing left or right on the Samsung remote. Also, fast forward/rewind capability (which may be a device issue, not the server).

I just remembered something else useful. I wasn't able to get subtitles to show that are embedded in MKV files. However, you can use mkvmerge GUI to extract subtitles from MKV files to individual (srt if memory serves) files. As long as they're named the same as the video, it works just fine.

I got my new BD-C6500 blu ray player from Samsung yesterday. Connecting it to my home wireless network was easy. It connected to it and I was able to watch online content (movies on Netflix, Accuweather, USA News, etc.) using the Internet@TV applications from Samsung. So this basically proves that my blu-ray player is indeed connected wirelessly to my home network.

Now I installed the PC share manager on my Windows Vista laptop (also connected wirelessly to my router) and shared one of pictures folder. Now when I hit the Share button and choose the 'Set Device Policy' I just don't see my Blu-Ray player.

I have tried doing everything I can think of but still can't make the PC Share manager to recognize my blu-ray player. Anybody has any suggestions as what to do?

I know you mentioned that it has 'wireless' connection, have you tried a hard wire connection for both devices?

Yes I tried that too, connected both my laptop and the Blu-ray player to the router using LAN cables but I still had the same problem (blu-ray player not being detected in the PC Share Manager)

Strange, just so you understand my set up is a bit different, I have a Samsung TV, PN58C550 that has the AllShare feature, and it of course shows up in the Device Policy list of PC Share Manager.

I would assume the the C6500 runs a similar if not the identical AllShare program.

The specifications on websites for BD-C6500 does say that it has an AllShare feature. Do you know a place in the settings for Blu-Ray menu where we can check that or needs to be enabled before it can be shared with networks?

Although I don't have a BD-P6500 pages 27-29 in the manual pretty much cover it all.

Also remember: To use AllShare function, please locate both this player and PC in same subnet.

The only difference I can see is that they have connected the computer through LAN wire where as mine is connected wirelessly. I'll try this out today.

That shouldn't make any difference.

Also check the DHCP clients table in the router that both devices can be seen and appear on the same subnet.

Interesting thread! I've been using a modified original Xbox since 2006 to drive my TV with media stored on my home LAN (Xbox runs XBMC which uses Windows CIFS network file sharing protocol). But the old Xbox isn't very suitable for HD so I'm looking for alternatives.

Has anybody successfully used a Synology NAS (DLNA/UPnP-compliant vesions) or PlayOn with their Samsung DLNA-compliant devices?

p.s. PlayOn basic lifetime subscription will cease to be offered on May 20.

p.s.s This is the Synology I'm considering, has very nice RAID capabilities for the price:

http://www.synology.com/enu/products/DS210j/index.php

As you are familiar with XBMC, why not install the windows version on a PC and run with that? I was looking at this product and the interface, capabilities and skins look pretty cool!

Good Q. While I'm a big fan of XBMC, my strategy going forward is to serve media off a NAS or my home PC (which is almost always on in the evenings) to a DLNA client. I prefer not to have an HTPC located near my HT. The Synology NAS is nice because it has a sleep mode for the HD's. Plus it can automatically turn itself on/off on a daily schedule. So from a power utilization viewpoint, its greener than most. Besides media serving, all the other typical reasons for having a NAS apply as well (RAID backup, BT client, web server, etc).

That said, if I had to run XBMC on an HTPC, I would lean towards Linux. I would not want to wait for Windows booting every time the HTPC is turned on. The idea is for the HTPC to be more like an appliance than a PC. In that sense, I would almost rather mod a PS3 and use that as both a set-top and DLNA client. But I'm not sure if the rumors of a PS3 hack (modchip) are really true.

There are so many options in this space! One could also look at set-tops, with or without DLNA/UPnP support. But I think the key is to find a system where both ends are open. On the back end, servers like Serviio are open source while others like PlayOn and J River are proprietary. DLNA on the client side is problematic since Samsung, Panny, etc aren't going to be flexible to users demands. I don't know which set-tops are DLNA-compatible, but if you look for example at WDTV, which is built on a Linux platform, there is an open development community actively supporting it. You can bet Samsung won't be adding/fixing many features on the C5500 & C6500 BDP's come next year. But it just so happens I need a new BDP player

I ran XBMC on my xbox too, and yeah that was awesome. Windows filesharing works much much better and faster than this DLNA crap. But I gave it up for similar reasons, although it'll play mkv and everything works fine, it isnt fast enough to play them watch-ably... I looked into options for a faster cpu for it, but pretty much non-existent before finally giving it up.

In PCSM, there is a setting that you have to locate your Blu-ray player and tell PCSM to Allow that device to share files with it.

That's correct BritInVa, the PCSM is not able to even recognize my Blu-Ray player , so I cannot authorize it. I downloaded the Serviio thing yesterday night, will try it out soon and let you all know the results.

Hey..

I have a Samsung 40C650 lcd tv.

Can i watch x264 files from DLNA ?

By PCSM or any other way to do that?

Thanks...

My bad! Is your player and your PC on the same subnet? If you have multiple routers, then having your PC with an IP address of say 192.168.1.100 and you player with an IP of 192.168.2.100 would make it very difficult to share. I doubt it would be an issue, but you may check your firewall settings.