Yayyyyyyy!
Yet another neither one thing nor the other 80% review.
We all live in a 80% world it seems.
The Bravia KDL-40CX523 is the little net-connected TV that could. Consigned to somewhere near the bottom of Sony’s 2011 line-up, and cursed with a CCFL backlight instead of trendy LED bulbs, it’s clearly not one of the brand’s hero products. Yet this transpires to be a quite a desirable gogglebox. Sony Bravia KDL-40CX523 Fat …
>You’ll be able to play AVIs and MP4s, but nothing in an MKV wrapper.
Some AVIs, not all. Some MP4s. Not all.
Sony TVs seem inordinately picky - haven't been able to work out the specific settings required to guarantee a play when I experimented re-encoding existing files. One thing's for sure - that, ahem, movie trailer you downloaded from the internet is as likely to not work as work.
It's probably by design that Sony didn't really want to make the feature work, what with their movie business. You're better off looking at another TV or an additional device to view AVI or MP4 files.
In addtion, forget about the dongle - reports are that the signal strength is rubbish requiring same-room streaming (defeats the point really) - get a Netgear Ethernet to Wireless Adapter to turn the LAN port into a wireless one. Works a treat and is cheaper and you can use it with any device with a LAN port - and with a switch for multiple devices.
Sony kit is fully DLNA compliant and here is a good reference of what nightmare it is:
http://gxben.wordpress.com/2008/08/24/why-do-i-hate-dlna-protocol-so-much/
It also uses the same software to read media so rather unsurprisingly it recognises only a handful of "approved encodings".
There is a workaround for that - stream in a format which uses its own packetisation and own profile definitions. So the question here is: "Does the TV support let's say mmsh (microsoft media player streaming), generic streaming over http, etc? "
If it does and if it can navigate to these via the browser as a UI it can be made into a very nifty frontend to any media service (and collection of media). In btw - that will be the "right" way of doing that in the first place.
I used to work in the domestic TV industry and unfortunately, the issues with DLNA are all too typical of what comes out of it. The rules tend to be along the lines of :-
- If the idea/design/whatever is useful and easy to use then NO, you can't have it.
- If it's a really awkward and useless idea then YES, we absolutely must have it.
- If it actually takes more effort and engineering to make it awkward and useless rather than useful and easy then DOUBLE YES - get it into the product NOW! Extra points if the idea makes the product unstable. Even more points if adding this new useless feature gives us an excuse to remove a useful feature.
- If the feature is SO useless that 99% of people won't even realise it's built-in to the product then make MORE of it in the next version! (example - how many people even know about the apps built into their new Sony TVs? Don't feel stupid if you don't - they aren't even mentioned in the manual)
- If it was thought the feature was useless, but it turns out the end-users actually found a way of making it useful then (yep - you guessed it!), remove the feature from the next version
I wish this was all a joke, but it's not - I have seen it all too often first-hand.