DLNA with a Panasonic Viera
I bought a Panasonic Viera LED TV before the holidays and the TV is DLNA certified. I finally figured out how to get DLNA to work properly with the TV.
Serviio
I installed Serviio on a Linux (Ubuntu) box. Serviio is an Opensource DLNA server written in Java. Running it launches a daemon in the background which listens for requests on a specific port, and it also ships with a console app to configure it.
The TV should automatically discover the DLNA server, and you should be able to browse the shared folders on the server. I was able to play some of the videos directly without any problems, but playing other videos failed.
“Cannot read file” errors
Serviio supposedly uses ffmpeg underneath to transcode the videos on-the-fly if necessary. I couldn’t get this to work properly. I basically ended up manually transcoding videos into the NTSC-DVD format with ffmpeg and then dropping the transcoded videos into the shared folder. Now the videos started working fine. I was able to pause/skip videos correctly as well.
ffmpeg -i source.avi -target ntsc-dvd -ps 2000000000 -aspect 16:9 target.mpeg
