The unfriendly television!

If you happen to have a Samsung Series 6 LCD TV, you probably have already found out that not all the features work out of the box for a Linux user. Fortunately, the fix is easy after a bit of googling.

I was able to get its DLNA working with MediaTomb after adding following lines¹ to its configuration file (thanks to crappylogin for sharing the code):

<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=01700000000000000000000000000000" /> 
</custom-http-headers> 

and this to mappings tag:

<map from="avi" to="video/mpeg" /> 

Also, X on Fedora 11 doesn't seem to get EDID unless HDMI cable is attached while the system boots. Again, workaround is simply adding correct Modelines using xrandr. Here are Modelines for Samsung LA32B650:

"1920x1080"  148.50  1920 2008 2052 2200  1080 1084 1089 1125 +hsync +vsync 
"1360x768"   85.50  1360 1424 1536 1792  768 771 777 795 +hsync +vsync 

Despite this little annoyance, the TV is a joy to use. It can play contents from a DLNA server as well as USB flash or HDD and has a comprehensive codec support.

I haven't spent much time on it yet but if you are interested, you can download source code of its firmware here.

Links:
http://forums.tversity.com/viewtopic.php?f=2 & amp;t=10992 & amp;st=0 & amp;sk=t & amp;sd=a & amp;start=45