This story is a tad long, but I promise I'll eventually get around to the subject line. About 4 weeks ago, I started getting errors on 2 of my data drives about unrecoverable sectors and and within days I found myself rebuilding a crashed server over a very long and protracted weekend. One casualty of the MSS rebuild was that I finally decided I'd had enough of the SageTV streaming solution. It was a pain to set up and with no official support I finally saw it for the dead end that it is. But with no Sage, I started reading up on the current choices for streaming solutions. By happenstance, a week or so later, our 6 year old 32" Samsung LCD TV bit the dust. So, the streaming solution got pushed back to the back burner and I started looking for a new TV. However, it didn't take long for the features of Samsung's new SmartTV to catch my eye. They claimed to play streamed MKV files over a network and they have an organic Netflix set-up (which my family uses a lot), so I figured, 'what the heck' and pulled the trigger on a 32" 5300 series LED TV. I got it this past Tuesday. It took me a few hours to configure everything, but so far I'm very happy with the the decision.

In a nutshell, this set does play my MKV movie rips and seems to do so flawlessly. I did install the Samsung Media Streamer on the Server after downloading it off the Samsung web site, but so far that seems like an academic exercise. This set might play files streamed by Twonkey, but I decided to try their solution first and since it works I'm probably not going to mess with Twonkey. All of my MKV files are complied using Handbrake with H.264/AC3. The Samsung specs say nothing about the TV playing AC3 encodes, but sound did come across the speakers. Of course the set only has stereo speakers, so there's obviously some down mixing going on. But...the set also passes the AC3 signal through to the set's optical port which allows my Yamaha AV receiver to handle the audio. Note that there is nothing in the specs on that feature either! Another cool thing is the the 5300 and higher series has a wireless LAN built in along with hard wired Ethernet port meaning connectivity is not an issue.

There is only one thing lacking so far and that is a some sort of jukebox interface like My Movies. If I could get that then it'd be perfect!

_________________
X510 w/7 TB (100% WD Green EARS)
Stock Processor, 4 GB Memory Upgrade