SYNACK Posted April 29, 2011 Posted April 29, 2011 I went looking for TVs today and ran across a brand new Sony on special. So I try it with the usual media files on a USB key to see how it will work with my extencive library of media files. Guess how many it managed to play? None, thats right not a single one. End result, a nice new Samsung TV. Sure it has a few less features but it actually plays things that have not been blessed by Sony. I knew it was a bad sign when I looked up the TV online and what kinds of files it played were not listed anywhere. I had no idea they weren't listed because there was nothing to put in the list. Admittedly I did not put in a JPG or MP3 as I did not even have a doubt that anything would be unable to play them (not so sure now). But Xvid, MKV, even DIVX were all a bust.
sted Posted April 29, 2011 Posted April 29, 2011 just tried a random divx on mine seems fine. MKV's i believe are an issue but they always seem to cause me grief on a pc
SYNACK Posted April 29, 2011 Author Posted April 29, 2011 Is it from the latest line though, the one I was looking at was this KDL-32CX520 (KDL32CX520, KDL32CX520BU) : Overview : TV & home cinema : Sony . By comparision the Samsung played all of the files no problems. I think Sony is getting into this whole self sabotage thing a bit too much. If they keep going down this route they'll be releasing a version of Windows by the end of the year
RabbieBurns Posted April 29, 2011 Posted April 29, 2011 I am a Sony fanboy. I must admit most of my stuff is Sony. I drew the line at getting a Sony TV, as they were just way out my budget. I was able to get a 50" LG for what a 42" Sony would have cost me. Granted, it doesnt have all the features or media playback or internet connectivity, but I have all that through my WDTVLive anyway. Althuogh this would have been a welcome addition : Sony brings Skype to Bravia HD TVs ? reghardware
Arthur Posted April 29, 2011 Posted April 29, 2011 Even Samsung could do better - no support for DVD or BluRay ISOs with menus, H.264 MKVs with DTS/DTS-HD MA, Dolby TrueHD or FLAC audio, chapters in MKVs/MP4s, etc. All TVs should come with XBMC, Plex or Boxee built-in as standard IMO. LG has the right idea with their SmartTV range and ST600 add-on for non-smart TVs. Other manufacturers need to do the same. I think Sony is getting into this whole self sabotage thing a bit too much. Sony has always been bad at supporting non-Sony formats - most likely due to internal politics. They probably want you to buy a PS3 to go with your Sony TV.
cpjitservices Posted April 29, 2011 Posted April 29, 2011 Pioneer or the Panasonic Vierra both wonderful joyful TV's
Arthur Posted April 29, 2011 Posted April 29, 2011 @SYNACK. You may find the list of supported formats on the SamyGo website useful. It's much more comprehensive than Samsung's. http://sourceforge.net/apps/mediawiki/samygo/index.php?title=Media_Play_and_DLNA
SYNACK Posted April 29, 2011 Author Posted April 29, 2011 Even Samsung could do better - no support for DVD or BluRay ISOs with menus, H.264 MKVs with DTS/DTS-HD MA, Dolby TrueHD or FLAC audio, chapters in MKVs/MP4s, etc. All TVs should come with XBMC, Plex or Boxee built-in as standard IMO. LG has the right idea with their SmartTV range and ST600 add-on for non-smart TVs. Other manufacturers need to do the same. Sony has always been bad at supporting non-Sony formats - most likely due to internal politics. They probably want you to buy a PS3 to go with your Sony TV. I totally agree, if all TVs had such an internal system it would be epic but that would probably make the consumer happy hence not needing to upgrade It is a shame, the Sony TV looked like a really nice unit with lots of features but media support is trash. I have a suspision that they don't publish what it actually supports anywhere so they can pull a PS3 and yank features if they feel like it. I have an old 50" Sony that although still working has had massive issues and so I don't really trust them either. I have a friend with an LG and you are right the format support on that is massive but the picture quality was not as good on the one I looked at. @SYNACK. You may find the list of supported formats on the SamyGo website useful. It's much more comprehensive than Samsung's. SourceForge.net: Media Play and DLNA - samygo I have looked at that for my other TV which is a 40" Samsung, stupidly when I got that one I also looked at the comparable Sony with the same batch of test files that I used this time and the one year old one (from now) actually played quite a few of them fine so they have chosen to go backwards. Anyway I just don't have the nerve to reflash my TV incase it goes south and the one I have could only fit the really limited firmware on it. I would dearly love to reflash it with that and support for a usb hub, keyboard, mouse and RDP which would give me a nice little thinclient TV for my room but that is way above my skill level with linux let alone embedded linux
sted Posted April 29, 2011 Posted April 29, 2011 its a Sony Bravia KDL32EX703U bough last October. Tbh though thats the first time ive tried playing a file on it as its also my pcs monitor so i just use media centre. They do do dnla but i could never get that working with my old nas box and atm havnt bothered setting up any dnla on my replacement which is running 2008r2 though i may change that to vale at some point
SYNACK Posted April 29, 2011 Author Posted April 29, 2011 @sted - That sounds like about the time I was getting my last TV and at that point the sony ones did play a few of them alright. I've got a W7 media centre box in another room with lots of content which the Samsung handles nicely, the plan was for the new one to do that same so I tested with USB just to figure out the codec support. DLNA is great although it is a bit of a drag having to go through the Windows Media Player folder structure each time to actually get to the media from the DLNA client. Its good as it saves me having yet another computer floating around for miscelanious tasks If you want to use WMP for DLNA on your 2k8 box just install the Desktop Experience Role which includes it. WMP's DLNA is really good for a zero mantinence DLNA server as it picks up and adds new files instantly which is way better than the AllShare program from Samsung. I'm sure there are better ones but WMP is just so easy to setup.
ZeroHour Posted April 29, 2011 Posted April 29, 2011 BTW all I would watch out for Sony products (including the ps3 which has this NOW) for a tech called Cinavia - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
sted Posted April 29, 2011 Posted April 29, 2011 BTW all I would watch out for Sony products (including the ps3 which has this NOW) for a tech called Cinavia - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia meh cant say im 100% surprised and tbh i expect film studios to push this on all manufacturers sooner or later..same as with the extra encryption on avatar (and all the you wouldnt steal a car ads on films) it will only affect people with legit copies and will be removed from any copy
ZeroHour Posted April 29, 2011 Posted April 29, 2011 meh cant say im 100% surprised and tbh i expect film studios to push this on all manufacturers sooner or later..same as with the extra encryption on avatar (and all the you wouldnt steal a car ads on films) it will only affect people with legit copies and will be removed from any copy This tech could be used to block tv recordings as well btw.
RabbieBurns Posted April 29, 2011 Posted April 29, 2011 This tech could be used to block tv recordings as well btw. TV Recordings is perfectly legal though?
ZeroHour Posted April 29, 2011 Posted April 29, 2011 (edited) TV Recordings is perfectly legal though? If its not blocked but yes they could use it like they do macrovision. Also the feed from play to tv could add the signal to prevent recording to another device. HDMI does attempt to prevent this but this would fix analogue recordings. Tons of big media want things like this to prevent duplicate and distro to the net using analogue etc. Sky has its own DRM on the files as does Virgin when it comes to PVR but analogue hd feed could just bi-pass this but all they would do is firmware add the signal to prevent playback. Also I think a lot of sony's blu-ray players will have this detection built in soon if not now or with a future firmware update to prevent playback of files tagged. Edited April 29, 2011 by ZeroHour
Arthur Posted April 29, 2011 Posted April 29, 2011 I wouldn't worry about Cinavia too much. Verance was the company who also designed the copy protection and watermarking technology used on DVD-Audio discs and look how that turned out. DVD-Audio's copy protection was overcome in 2005 by tools which allow data to be decrypted or converted to 6 channel .WAV files without going through lossy digital-to-analog conversion. Previously that conversion had required expensive equipment to retain all 6 channels of audio rather than having it downmixed to stereo. In the digital method, the decryption is done by a commercial software player which has been patched to allow access to the unprotected audio. In 2007 the encryption scheme was overcome with a tool called dvdcpxm. In 12 February 2008 a program called DVD-Audio Explorer was released, containing aforementioned libdvdcpxm coupled with an open source MLP decoder. Like DVD-Video decryption, such tools may be illegal to use in the United States under the controversial Digital Millennium Copyright Act. While the Recording Industry Association of America has been successful in keeping these tools off websites, they are still distributed on P2P file sharing networks and newsgroups. Additionally, in 2007 the widely-used commercial software DVDFab Platinum added DVD-Audio decryption, allowing users to backup a full DVD-A image to ISO. (Source) In addition to that, the HDCP master key was leaked last year which would make it possible to intercept the protected audio and video streams as they leave the playback device. If links appearing on Twitter are to be believed (and right now there’s no reason to doubt them) then the master key for High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection (HDCP) has been revealed, making the DRM baked into devices such as Blu-ray players effectively dead. This is a big deal. Very big deal. It means that while HDCP devices have their own set of keys that can be revoked when they enter the public domain, uncovering the master key means that new source or sink keys can be created and there’s nothing that can be done to block them short of changing the master key, and that’s not going to happen. Why? Because changing the master key would effectively kill all current players, set-top boxes and HDMI-enabled devices. While some devices have upgradable firmware, plenty don’t, making a change of master key implausible. So, if this is the real deal, HDCP is dead. (Source)
ZeroHour Posted April 29, 2011 Posted April 29, 2011 Sadly though arthur without making a filter to remove the audio tag breaking hdcp would make no difference which is the point, its an audio tag that plays recognise and block but you cant perceive it and without filtering the stuff out which is possible with hassle but thats the point, control it enough to make it a hassle.
Arthur Posted April 29, 2011 Posted April 29, 2011 Good point. I suppose the way around it would be to use open source media players such as MPC-HC, VLC or MPlayer to playback the Cinavia-protected content on your computer. SlySoft also seem confident they will be able to remove this copy protection. We shall see.
ZeroHour Posted April 29, 2011 Posted April 29, 2011 (edited) Good point. I suppose the way around it would be to use open source media players such as MPC-HC, VLC or MPlayer to playback the Cinavia-protected content on your computer. SlySoft also seem confident they will be able to remove this copy protection. We shall see. Yeh an audio filter could do it and chapter filter. One thing to consider though is that if Windows 8/OSX whatever include it they could detect it coming from vlc and block access in theory, stealth drm to the max. Hell in theory your tv could turn off and walk out the room if it has the nasty audio pass by its way Edited April 29, 2011 by ZeroHour
john Posted April 30, 2011 Posted April 30, 2011 Hell in theory your tv could turn off and walk out the room if it has the nasty audio pass by its way That has brought a great image to my mind now of my TV running out of my room and out of hte house and streams of them doing that down the roads back to the local cop shops lol 1
SYNACK Posted April 30, 2011 Author Posted April 30, 2011 (edited) Could be fun though, burn off the DRM audio signal to a CD then drive around town cranking it (as its inaudable it would look innocent) near news events and such nuking TVs off. How many live feeds could you kill before they caught on. Edited April 30, 2011 by SYNACK 1
jamesfed Posted April 30, 2011 Posted April 30, 2011 I'd never want to leave my TV to play media files - all Windows Media Centre here that way when in 2014 and some new format comes out and Microsoft releases an update to play it I don't have to worry about if Sony will go and release new firmware for the TV.
sted Posted April 30, 2011 Posted April 30, 2011 @sted - That sounds like about the time I was getting my last TV and at that point the sony ones did play a few of them alright. I've got a W7 media centre box in another room with lots of content which the Samsung handles nicely, the plan was for the new one to do that same so I tested with USB just to figure out the codec support. DLNA is great although it is a bit of a drag having to go through the Windows Media Player folder structure each time to actually get to the media from the DLNA client. Its good as it saves me having yet another computer floating around for miscelanious tasks If you want to use WMP for DLNA on your 2k8 box just install the Desktop Experience Role which includes it. WMP's DLNA is really good for a zero mantinence DLNA server as it picks up and adds new files instantly which is way better than the AllShare program from Samsung. I'm sure there are better ones but WMP is just so easy to setup. just been looking into that the desktop experience role was installed (i wanted aero and gadgets (yes i know)) and the media streaming option just arnt there just get a "this page failed to load" if i try and change teh media sharing options. googling it just end up with other people saying the same. So im downloading home server 2011 from technet ive a spare 250gb drive (the drive the server came with used my own 160gb so i could test various os's etc using the 250 as storage
Arthur Posted April 30, 2011 Posted April 30, 2011 I'd never want to leave my TV to play media files - all Windows Media Centre here that way when in 2014 and some new format comes out and Microsoft releases an update to play it I don't have to worry about if Sony will go and release new firmware for the TV. A HTPC does seem like the best solution since it is far more flexible, particularly with HEVC (a.k.a. H.265) on the way (early 2013) and the ability to use PCIe cards (DVB-T2 etc.). the desktop experience role Have you seen this website: http://www.win2008r2workstation.com/?
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