[LINK] NBN Rollout in Tasmania: Next Phase

[Paul Brooks]

On 5/05/2011 8:39 AM, Tom Worthington wrote:
> David Boxall wrote:
>
>> ... junk mail from Harvey Norman extolling the virtues of "Connected 
>> TV". Somewhat optimistic I thought, given the state of telecomm's in my 
>> area.  ...
> An acquaintance purchased a TV with Internet connectivity, so I spent 
> some time hooking it up. The TV required the use of their own brand of 
> WiFi dongle. Instead I reconfigured a low cost router to act as a 
> wireless bridge and plugged that into the TV's Ethernet socket. This 
> made for a slow Internet connection, but I was surprised how well it 
> worked and how impressive the "Apps" provided by the TV were.
I've had my earlier generation Samsung hooked up by ethernet for a couple of years now
- using Powerline modules to connect back to the rest of the net through the mains
power wiring rather than wireless (thus the link is QoS-enabled and 100Mbps).
Initially the built-in Internet-connected  apps - a basic Yahoo stock market ticker, a
local weather indicator, and a few other things seemed cool, but I haven't used them
for a long time as they are not, in general, customisable to show the information I
wanted. These models didn't include a generic web-browser.

The main reason I wanted the network connectivity was for the built-in DLNA
capability, thus eliminating any need for an external media player to stream the local
music, photo and movie collection from a separate NAS. As this is all internal to the
house, the state of telecoms is immaterial.

Alas, the small range of supported video and audio codecs/formats, and some common
formats having restrictions on supported sizes (some movie files can play up to 1080i,
others only to 570p), and no MKV support means video files rarely play first time and
need to be re-encoded in a supported format before they can play.
The panel is full-HD 1080p capable, but the DLNA function only supports up to 1080i
and won't play bluray 1080p streams.
Unfortunately this also includes all the .AVI movies generated by our now-antiquated
digital camera over the past several years which are not supported and will not play.
AVI format is supported, but clearly not the CODEC or possibly the audio encoding used
by the Canon camera.

On the rare occasions when I find myself with time to watch a movie, I tend to use the
kids' Playstation 3 as a media-player instead of the television's built-in DLNA
function, as it supports a much wider range of video formats.

P.