Danny Tsang » Sony

Samsung 46D8000 Mini Review

Danny — Tue, 29 Nov 2011 00:01:14 +0000

Overview

I have been eyeing up a Samsung 8000 series T.V since last year and since the only discount that was applied was around £200 from release till the the C model was EOL with the new D series, it made me selfishly unhappy that other people knew this was a great T.V.

Assembly

The T.V comes in 2 main parts: the T.V itself and the stand. Putting the T.V onto the stand was a fairly simply task. Whilst it can be done as a one man task, 2 is definitely recommended. The stand is in 2 parts and must be assembled before putting the T.V on. Fixing consists of screws which are supplied but require Philips screw drivers. Once the T.V is slotted onto the stand, it can be left on without support but again this is not recommended.

The T.v can swivel on the stand and it’s very stiff. So stiff that you would need to hold the stand down so that it doesn’t rotate with the panel.

Connectivity

The Samsung T.V comes with a variety of connections main located at the rear and side of the unit, towards the left hand side when the rear is facing you (right hand side when looking at the D8000 from the front). USB and HDMI are full sized ports but some older ports must use a special Samsung adapter. I do not like the idea of having proprietary connectors but the unit is so thin it may be hard to mount a full sized SCART connector with enough strength.

The composite cable was very confusing to hook up. The same adapter is used for component video but the adapter has 2 red ends. The manual is black and white so it didn’t help and also the manual doesn’t even separate out the cables like the real cable. You can see in the above picture how I connected the cables together. The composite cable was used by the Nintendo Wii.

Setup

The setup process was very simple and clear. During the setup process, I was surprised and shocked that it had built in Wifi! I still opted for the wired option because I had one there and connected. Everything worked out of the box except for tuning channels because we didn’t have the ariel cable set up. Everything we watch is through Sky.

HDMI-CEC With Onkyo TS-SR508

The T.V comes with Consumer Electronics Control (CEC) which allows commands to be sent via HDMI. In the Sony T.V we had before it was called Sony Sync. Samsung calls this feature Anynet+. It allows the devices to send commands to one another such as remote control keys (like volume) from one device will pass it on to the other device. One of the best uses of CEC is turning the D8000 on also turns on the Onkyo Receiver on as well and also works by turning it off (to standby).

The 508 works with the Samsung T.V. The volume, on/off, pass through all works together. Whilst the volume controls from either remote turns the sound up or down on the Onkyo, the volume it reports back by the T.V OSD is 10 points above what Onkyo says it is. I could not find a way to turn off the Samsung volume OSD which appears on top of the Onkyo’s inbuilt volume OSD. Also the Samsung volume OSD flickers between 2 OSD. First saying Anynet+ then disappears and then displays the volume in numbers which causes the flicker. I prefer the Onkyo volume OSD because it has a volume level bar and value shown at the same time. Also the Anynet+ OSD is usually 10 units off the Onkyo volume reading.

A huge issue I have encountered is when the T.V is switched on it powers up the receiver from standby and after a few seconds it changes the input from what ever was selected before(usually cble/sat) to TV/CD. This is very frustrating because it means every time the T.V is turned on, you need to use the Onkyo remote to change the input selector. I have looked online and can confirm it’s the Samsung T.V doing it and not an Onkyo problem. The issue has persisted from the previous model (C8000). This leads me to believe Samsung will not fix it and the change in input is probably aimed at a Samsung receiver. There is no option to disable this without turning off Anynet+ (which defeats the object of not using the receiver remote).

I have also tried using the non-ARC HDMI port (any HDMI port except for 2), resetting Anynet+ and setting the input of Sky (the most used input) from cble/sat to TV/CD. The latter method worked but the sound goes out of sync even with lipsync turned on and other sound oddities like multi-channel goes funny or the sound fades on certain sound frequencies.

The last solution I found was to use a universal programmable remote such as Logitech’s Harmony remote controls but I think this is a workaround more than a fix. Also these remotes are not cheap (especially if you have just bought this T.V).

Apps

The apps are a good concept and offer some enhanced features otherwise would be delegated to the Xbox or PS3. The 46D8000 has 1GB of memory (around 900mb usable) for apps which include Lovefilm, weather, stocks, Twitter, Facebook, etc. There are plenty of apps to download from. Since using the T.V I have not really used them after trying them out but I don’t have a Lovefilm streaming subscription.

3D

The glasses that were included with the D8000 were the SSG-3100GB. They are big and bulky but they were also comfortable. They were a good pair of stock glasses using a CR2035 flat watch like battery. Sync with the T.V was tricky. If the Samsung T.V wasn’t in 3D mode the glasses will not connect to the T.V.

Also the glasses are very fragile. I managed to drop the SSG-3100GB from around waist height whilst I was putting them back into the foam sheet cloth that came with the glasses and the lense cracked, rendering them useless.

Before trying the 3D I had read it was not as good as what you’d see in the cinema. This set my expectation lower and after watching Gnomeo & Juliet the Internet wasn’t even half right. The 3D doesn’t pop out and almost hit you like the cinema but more like pops out of the T.V slightly.

Sky Remote Control Code

The Sky controller T.V buttons stopped working after the switch from the Sony KDL32W5000. The volume buttons were the most frequently used keys. To fix this issue the Sky remote T.V code must be changed. To change Sky code to 1340. Sky has a code look up page found here. I tried to use the Sky Active service but it didn’t list the T.V model. The remote control revision number should be printed on a label on the back of the battery cover which says SkyHD rev.xR on the second line and where x is the revision number.

Updates

Updates are checked automatically and a message box appears when a new one is found.

Summary

The T.V is a big upgrade from my 32W5000 Sony Bravia T.V The options and features included go above and beyond what I was use to. Once you’re use to looking at thin bezel even computer monitors seem to have an unnecessary thick plastic boarder around them. The 3D was more or less useless in my opinion because it doesn’t have the depth that a cinema screen gives and there’s hardly any content current that require the technology.

If it wasn’t for the Onkyo receiver issue this would have been a faultless T.V

TX-SR508 keeps resetting input – HDMI-CEC problem?

MediaTomb DLNA To Playstation 3

Danny — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 00:01:19 +0000

Overview

I found the Video plugin for MythTV 0.21 to be inadequate for streaming to the Sony Playstation 3. It didn’t update fast enough when you dropped a video into the UPnP directory and also there was no external way of telling it to refresh it’s list of files without starting up Myth Frontend.

MediaTomb

MediaTomb is a UPnP server which can run as a standalone or as a daemon. It uses an XML configuration file for it’s settings (pretty neat stuff) and is pretty small in size. The software comes with it’s own web server so you don’t have to install a full apache install to get to the control panel and it uses SQLite by default so no big database backend to be installed.

Install & Configure MediaTomb

Install MediaTomb and ffmeg thumbnailer
sudo apt-get install mediatomb ffmpegthumbnailer
That’s it for the install!

edit the file config file in /etc/mediatomb/config.xml and change the following settings:

Enable PS3 support change this:

and also

–>

Add the line

below
/usr/share/mediatomb/web
so that it looks like this
/usr/share/mediatomb/web
This hides the full directory path from the Playstation so it can only view the directories added and not the full system.

Add the following to enable thumbnail previews. I have found this does not work 100% of the time.

Enable transcoding

to

Add the following transcode mappings under tag:

Add the following settings between the elements. Not the parent is plural and each profile is singular.

image/jpeg
yes
yes
128×128

<buffer size=”524288″ chunk-size=”512″ fill-size=”1024″/>

Restart MediaTomb service sudo /etc/init.d/mediatomb restart If it fails to restart then double check the config file for errors.

Go to the machine in a web browser on port 49152 e.g http://localhost:49152

On this web page configures the directories available over UPnP. The Database section shows what directories are visible / registered to MediaTomb and Filesystem shows the computer directories that can be added for DLNA / UPnP visibility. When a directory is added MediaTomb scans the directory and register them so they show up on the Playstation. These can include music, videos and pictures.

In the top right hand corner there is a plus “+” with two arrows around it. Clicking on it loads a new page in the main window, replacing the file lists in the directory. This is the page for setting how often it scans for changes.

Go to the Playstation, turn it on and go to the relevant category e.g photo in the menu. There should be a MediaTomb server in the list. If it does not appear go towards the top and scan for more media servers to look for MediaTomb.

Summary

The software is pretty self contained but I would have liked the option to use Apache and MySQL because those are already installed on my system.

MediaTomb does the job for now and whilst I cannot get the thumbnails to work on all the media it still does a brillant job of streaming the media to the Playstation. Unfortunately it’s not integrated into MythTV so records will still have to be done via MythTV but this is not a problem because all recorded TV shows are registered in the database.

A problem I did encounter was that I added multiple directories but reguardless of where they reside on the computer, all videos appear in one directory on the Playstation. I’m not sure if this is a bug or how it’s suppose to work.

[HOWTO]:Stream DivX/XviD to a PS3 with firmware 2.10 using MediaTomb and Ubuntu 7