I have seen a lot of information online about the limitations of the Samsung TV and the PC Share Manager. It is very true. I have been working on perfecting my DLNA network for a couple of months and finally have some tips to share. I tested a bunch of file types but not all in the video converter program. I am only reporting what I have found. The best thing to do is if you have a file, try to play it before going through the conversion, you may get lucky.
My System:
Samsung LN52B750 lcd tv with hardwire Ethernet jack
Serviio DLNA program on PC (freeware)
VideoLan VLC PLayer (freeware)
*note: I dumped PC Share for Serviio instead, I tried tversity and did not have much luck with it either.
I have some HD movies on my PC that I wanted to play on the TV. Unfortunately, even though they are 1080p, they were created in a 1920 x 800 resolution. I determined this by playing the file in VLC Player and going to TOOLS/CODEC INFORMATION. The TV does not like this resolution and will tell you it is not a supported file type. It also was an MKV file so I don't think it liked that either. What I found is:
1. convert the file to 1920 x 1080, this is a supported resolution
2. during this same conversion process use the x264 Codec
I tried 3 different conversion programs, two of them that were a free trial but would cost $30 to $40 for a license. I figured those would be the best and worked with them for a while. There were problems with the audio lagging from the video by 1 second after conversion, or inability to select the audio track (english vs. german, etc.). The program that did the trick is a freeware - Any Video Converter . It does a great job, matter of fact it was the only one that did the job correctly at all.
OK, so you now have this product. You also have an MPG / MKV / VOB or some other type of file that you would like to convert to a DLNA compliant x264 file:
1. Select file for source (Add Video)
2. Select on the right pane up top under Profile, Customized AVI Movie
3. Down below in the Video Codecs option, select x264 from list
4. Select the Frame size that best matches the source file as determined in VLC Player. For instance, if you have a 1920 x 800 file make it 1920 x 1080, the software will just add black bands to the top bottom, it doesn't warp the file. If you had a 1280 x 600 resolution you will need to make it 1280 x 720 to play on the tv.
5. I use 12000 for the bitrate and 23.976 for frame rate, I tried other frame rates but playback was jerky.
5. Audio codec I leave as MP3/bitrate 128/sample rate 44100/audio channel 2/ and the other selections as stock.
6. If the file has a foreign language as the default audio you can use the Audio Track dropdown to select English if it is available. The TV does not allow you to select multiple tracks so you must make sure that you select a new default if you source file defaults to another language.
7. Once you do all this you can convert the file, it will play on the TV.
A large file (15 gig) took almost 18 hours to convert. But my PC is a bit older and while it is robust may be slower than yours.
I did notice that shorter length video's will fast forward but longer do not. I do not know why.
Good luck.
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