Playback on USB attached to Sony BluRay

[cedenk]

I generated .MKV files on a USB drive using version 1.7.10 of MakeMKV. When I attach the USB to the the Sony BDP-S590 bluray player, it can recognize and see all the .MKV files. When I run any of them, I get "Unsupported or Corrupt File". Looking across the web I see lots of reasons for this. I an NOT a video expert, I'm just someone trying to copy my legal DVDs and BluRays to disk so I can have a copy to view without letting the kids scratch of the originals.

Is there a simple explantion for this and a workaround? I've read about the 5.1->4.1 profile business and I've tried running mkclean.exe without any success. Is there a way for an average joe to do this?

[crowfax]

Blu-ray players which claim to support media files via USB typically have awful format support. You'll find what your player supports is a very narrow range of video and audio formats inside an MKV file.

If you want the easy answer; buy something like the "Western Digital TV Live" player for $80 and save yourself the time and effort.

If you want to make your Blu-ray player work, you'll have to re-encoded the MKV file you have made. Use Handbrake and pick the "normal" setting, chance the file type to MKV and let it run. It may take a while depending on the speed of your computer. The resulting file should would on your blu-ray player.

[cedenk]

Thanks for the reply! Another hiccup was using DLNA, to allow for remote disk storage of a few TB of data. Apparently the list of supported formats when you use this gets even more restricted. I've given up and just purchased the 400 slot BluRay player. This should buy me some time until all this gets sorted out in a couple of years. I guess this is what happens when Movie Makers get involved in restricting hardware development.

I may still try out your recommendation for another player, though... Thanks again.

[crowfax]

I guess this is what happens when Movie Makers get involved in restricting hardware development.

Not really, people like Sony just buy the cheapest chip they can find for decoding media files and add it to their player so they can have another bullet point on their list of features. It's a shame, they could use the Realtek 1xx5 and 1xx6 chips and give people amazing playback performance from local media files, but no doubt it'd take away $2 from the sale of every player over the lower end chip they use.

[Woodstock]

If you are wanting to use DLNA, you need to restrict yourself pretty much to MP4 files, and you MAY have to change the file extensions on the files.

DLNA is a lousy standard. I have several DLNA compliant devices. While all will support MP4 files, there is no file extension that is common to all of them. Two will not see any file that doesn't have a MPG as the file extension, another can't see MPG or MP4, but sees M4V just fine.

One will play MKV files... but not via DLNA! They have to be plugged in to a USB port, and then it won't handle a device larger than 32GB, and it better be formatted FAT32 (meaning no BD video, files are too big).

Best bet is something that supports "real" networking, if you want best flexibility. The WD Live mentioned before is well liked. I use (and complain about sometimes) Uebo, Seagate, and Asus players with good success.