Media Play and DLNA

These Samsung TVs are capable of playing serveral audio, video and image formats. These media contents can be played from an USB mass storage device (pendrive, USB hard disk), or from a DLNA network server. With firmware modifications it is possible to add support for media play over NFS or SMB/CIFS. This page tries to give detailed info about the playable formats, (the offical list does not go into details and also states that even with a supported media format not all content can be played) and also tries to outline the limitations of playing media content through DLNA using different DLNA servers.

Supported formats

Below is a table of the (more or less officially) supported media formats for USB playing (DLNA support may be different):

File Extension	Container	Video Decoder	Audio Codec	Resolution	Frame/sec	Mbit/sec
*.avi	AVI	Divx 3.11	MP3 AC3 LPCM ADPCM (MULAW ALAW)	800x600	6 ~ 30	8
		Divx 4.x		800x600	6 ~ 30	8
		Divx 5.1		800x600	6 ~ 30	8
		Divx 6.0		800x600	6 ~ 30	20
		XviD		1920x1080	6 ~ 30	20
		H.264 BP		1920x1080	6 ~ 30	25
		H.264 MP		1920x1080	6 ~ 30	25
		H.264 HP		1920x1080	6 ~ 30	25
		MPEG-4 SP		800x600	6 ~ 30	8
		MPEG-4 ASP		800x600	6 ~ 30	8
		Motion JPEG		800x600	6 ~ 30	8
*.mkv	MKV	Divx 3.11	MP3 AC3 LPCM ADPCM (MULAW ALAW)	800x600	6 ~ 30	8
		Divx 4.x		800x600	6 ~ 30	8
		Divx 5.1		800x600	6 ~ 30	8
		Divx 6.0		800x600	6 ~ 30	20
		XviD		1920x1080	6 ~ 30	20
		H.264 BP		1920x1080	6 ~ 30	25
		H.264 MP		1920x1080	6 ~ 30	25
		H.264 HP		1920x1080	6 ~ 30	8
		MPEG-4 SP		800x600	6 ~ 30	8
		MPEG-4 ASP		800x600	6 ~ 30	8
		Motion JPEG		800x600	6 ~ 30	8
*.asf	ASF	Divx 3.11	WMA MP3 AC3 LPCM ADPCM (MULAW ALAW), AAC	800x600	6 ~ 30	8
		Divx 4.x		800x600	6 ~ 30	8
		Divx 5.1		800x600	6 ~ 30	8
		Divx 6.0		800x600	6 ~ 30	20
		XviD		1920x1080	6 ~ 30	20
		H.264 BP		1920x1080	6 ~ 30	25
		H.264 MP		1920x1080	6 ~ 30	25
		H.264 HP		1920x1080	6 ~ 30	25
		MPEG-4 SP		800x600	6 ~ 30	8
		MPEG-4 ASP		800x600	6 ~ 30	8
wmv(VC1)		Window Media Video v9		1920x1080	6 ~ 30	25
*.mp4	MP4(SMP4)	H.264 BP	ADPCM (HE)-AAC MP3	1920x1080	6 ~ 30	25
		H.264 MP		1920x1080	6 ~ 30	25
		H.264 HP		1920x1080	6 ~ 30	25
		MPEG-4 SP		800x600	6 ~ 30	8
		MPEG-4 ASP		800x600	6 ~ 30	8
		XviD		1920x1080	6 ~ 30	20
*.3gp	3GPP	H.264 BP	ADPCM (HE)-AAC	1920x1080	6 ~ 30	25
		H.264 MP		1920x1080	6 ~ 30	25
		H.264 HP		1920x1080	6 ~ 30	25
		MPEG-4 SP		800x600	6 ~ 30	8
		MPEG-4 ASP		800x600	6 ~ 30	8
*.vro(ps)	VRO VOB	MPEG2	AC3, MPEG LPCM	1920x1080	6 ~ 30	40
		MPEG1		1920x1080	6 ~ 30	40
*.mpg *.mpeg(ps)		MPEG1 (Program Stream)	AC3, MPEG LPCM	1920x1080	6 ~ 30	40
		MPEG2 (Program Stream)		1920x1080	6 ~ 30	40
others(ts)		MPEG2(Transport Stream)	AAC, HE-AAC MP3 DD+	1920x1080	6 ~ 30	25
		H.264 HP (Transport Stream)		1920x1080	6 ~ 30	40
		VC1 (Transport Stream)		1920x1080	6 ~ 30	25

Unsupported formats

There are some audio codecs (apart from the exotic propriatery ones) that are unfortunately not supported. These are:

• DTS
• AMR
• OGG
• ALAC

The TV also known to have limitations for H.264 (e.g. MKV playing), the number of supported Reference Frames in the H.264 encoded content is limited. Some say that at most 9 reference frames are supported, however I personally experienced problems (Unsupported video format error, or instant TV poweroff) with 1920x1080 H.264 video with 8 reference frames.