Mediatomb DLNA Server On Ubuntu For Samsung Tv

Media

Challenge

You have a nice new Samsung led TV with Ethernet support. You also have an Ubuntu server in your network. You want to make use of the media support of the TV but don’t know how.

Solution

I have a UE40C6000 Samsung TV. So the whole explanation below is based on this TV. I guess that it will also work for the other Samsung Series. The solution given below is done with MediaTomb DLNA server. The default installment as provided by aptitude does not work correctly with the Samsung TV’s…

  • install MediaTomb via Ubuntu’s apt-get
  • open /etc/mediatomb/config.xml in your text editor of choice
  • remove the comment tags around the section and make that section look like this:
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<custom-http-headers>
   <add header="transferMode.dlna.org: Streaming"/>
   <add header="contentFeatures.dlna.org: DLNA.ORG_OP=01;DLNA.ORG_CI=0;DLNA.ORG_FLAGS=017000 00000000000000000000000000"/>
</custom-http-headers>
  • Under <mappings>, add 
<map from="avi" to="video/mpeg"/>
<map from="mkv" to="video/mpeg"/>
  • save and close config.xml and restart mediatomb
  • load MediaTomb web interface and tell it where to start looking for files. http://localhost:49152/

If you already configured folders to scan etc. in the web interface… You need to remove them all and reload them all to update the mime-types.

Discussion

If anyone can tell me how to get the youtube streaming to work as well please do tell! Same for the Apple trailers.

As of 2012 I am trying out Serviio as a DLNA server and it seems to work fine with both my Samsung TV’s

Update:

As of 2016 I use the DLNA functionality i Synology NAS so no further updates will be posted for this blog…