Linux, Bravia and DLNA

I've had the Sony Bravia 52W5150 for a few months now. My wife and I are pretty happy with it (though my wife does most of the TV watching). I initially picked up the TV so my wife could watch the Yankee's games in HD and I like the features and the fact that it used Linux. The overall reviews were pretty good and the price was pretty good. So far I haven't figured out how to get at the Linux but that wasn't unexpected and some of the touted features such as the web browser and web apps (like the iPhone) have not really materialized. In fact the web apps seemed to have fallen off the face of the planet. I did manage to find the documentation but it's written in Japanese, the PDFs are locked so you can't copy the text into a translator and the emulator only runs on Windows XP except it's broken and doesn't even run there. From what I can tell Sony has stopped doing anything with it and the only apps are pretty lame. So basically the network interface is only useful for Sony to get viewing habits (oops, my Tivo messes that up) and upgrading the TV firmware. Wow, what a fluster cluck! The fact that the user menu is so slow and hideous is reason enough that someone at Sony should be shot for that! Great concept but lousy delivery. Overall I give the TV portion a 4.0 (out of 5) as the picture is very good, HD looks great but the user interface to the of the TV options slow. The rest gets a 2 only because the TV portion is so good.

This week I've spent some time working on getting a DLNA server up and running under Linux. The Bravia TV doesn't work with my MediaTomb setup (I have tried my Twonky Server lately). Actually it only partially seems to work with MiniDLNA. It doesn't seem to be a problem with the server but rather the TV. I'm not certain what type of files the TV wants. So far the Bravia only seems to display the MP3 files (all the files show up in the trace). The server is delivering the rest but the Bravia doesn't show them, no photos and no videos. I'm finding this a little frustrating. I might find that I'll have better luck with the new Series 3 Tivo I have. Well we see about that later.

I've started to look at the additional content that the TV has (internet access content) but it's really pretty lame. I watched one 'WIRED' episode and it seemed very amateurish. I've seen kids do better with a web camera and some after school time. CBS jumped into the fray with a number of it's episodes but they're only 3 minute snippets of shows. No wonder Nielson's was quoted as saying that the cutting of the TV cord is not happening. The only one's who've figured this out is companies like Netflix. The rest are sitting back hoping it won't happen and in the process not making money where money is ready to be made.

Update: 2010/06/22 - Just found PyTivo which might do what I'd like and let the Tivo be a UPnP or DLNA like client. I can run PyTivo on my Linux Server and let it handle the transcoding of the various files. I still need to do a bit more homework as at some point I don't want to run a dozen different servers when I only need to run one.