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On Boxing Day I finally gave into a long held desire; I purchased a big, flat-panel TV. After checking the thickness of my wallet (or rather, the lack thereof) and doing some online research, I settled upon the Sony Bravia KDL-46W5100 LCD TV.
I won’t review the TV in this post. If you’re interested, check out CNET’s review or the Future Shop’s customer reviews. Needless to say, I’m very happy with my KDL-46W5100, especially considering the low price I paid on Boxing Day.
The real purpose of this post is to show you how to stream videos to a KDL-46W5100.
If you already own a KDL-46W5100 or have spent some time researching the model, you’ll probably know that it can play free and pay-per-view streaming videos from the Internet via its Bravia Internet Video feature. But did you know that the KDL-46W5100 is also a DLNA media player, allowing you to play music, photos and videos served up by compatible media servers on your home network?
One such media server is PS3 Media Server or PS3MS, for short. In this article, I’ll show you how to play streaming videos on your KDL-46W5100 TV using PS3 Media Server.
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Nice article, thx. I have a Bravia with an ethernet port (not sure which model – will check when I get home after work) and discovered the TV’s streaming capability by chance last night. I already had PS3 Media Server set up for use with my PS3. Curiously, the Bravia seemed capable of streaming a wider range of video formats than the console, including 1080p Blu-ray rips which my PS3 struggles with (perhaps relating to a codec problem). However, the picture quality of video streamed to the Bravia was poor, even for SD files. I’m wondering how you find the quality of video streamed to your TV and whether adjusting the PS3MS config makes any difference?
cheers
I’ve found the quality to be good. For me, the biggest factor in picture quality has been the quality of the movie file being played; good rips look good, bad rips look bad.
That said, you can certainly try tweaking the renderer settings for PS3MS. Some of the gurus on the PS3MS forum might have tips. The other thing is to check for a later version of PS3MS than what I used. I think they were working on the Bravia support recently.
Also, try to use at least a 100 Mbps wired ethernet connection instead of wireless. You could use 1000 Mbps but it shouldn’t make a difference because the TV’s ethernet port is only rated at 100 Mbps.
You might also want to try buying a WDTV Live media player. I bought one recently and it works well with that TV.