Talk:Media Play and DLNA

I wanted to start a discussion on this page to clarify some of the information on it.

1) Support for h.264 inside an .avi container is a BadThing™ and falls in to the "yeah, it's possible to do this, but why would you?" category of things. My rationale is to recommend users not do this as it's generally a bad idea to advise the average user to hack standards for the following reasons:

1 - .avi has very limited support for b-frames which doesn't include (in spec) a way to properly handle h.264 b-frames 2 - any .avi which contains h.264 is hacked and not spec-compliant 3 - CE devices will not play h.264-in-avi without using non-compliant hacks. most vendors will not release software to intentionally play hacked formats due to compatibility/security/stability/legal reasons 4 - just because x264/ffdshow does it, doesn't mean you should too 5 - there are several standard containers which were designed for h.264 and those can more easily be utilized 6 - encouraging users to create non-compliant containers when appropriate standards exist doesn't make sense

..in summary, even though Samsung says they support this, we should mention this is a "not recommended" practice. I don't want to offend anyone (someone in particular, :-D ) - it's wiser to think-forward and err on the side of compatibility instead of using a hack. After the last 10 years in the IT industry, my experience says hack=bad. Make things do what they are designed & intended to do.

2) It would probably be wise to have both the main "supported formats" list as a reference (i.e. at the end of the page), whilst having a more practical chart higher up on the page. The first chart would list the video codec first, maximum resolutions, codec-specific information, audio codec info, followed by applicable industry-accepted container formats.

3) There should probably be a separate encoding chart which addresses each codec at necessary increments. For example, using h.264 with a CE target such as a high-definition TV, XBox360, or PS3, one should use High Profile (HP) level 4 or 4.1 for encoding at 720p or 1080i/p. The chart on the page doesn't address what CE targets are. Should the information on the chart is taken literally, someone might get the (wrong) impression that Baseline Profile (BP) or Main Profile (MP) is appropriate for hi-def content. Sure, you can do it, but the quality will be worse and will achieve a much larger encode than what HP can product.

4) It would be very useful if someone had a document describing the characteristics of the codecs the Samsung HDTVs support. For example, when using h.263 (DivX/XviD), does it support all DivX profiles or only a subset? Does it support h.264 up to HP 4.1 or higher/lower? What are the valid options for .wmv encoding (v9/v10? - vc1 compliance)? Most of the questions I have concerning audio support is defined by the container being used and doesn't require any research.

I would appreciate any commentary anyone wants to offer on this subject. The data needs to be more practical.