I'm wanting to put together something inexpensive and simple to do nothing but serve video files to my Samsung Smart TV. It should simply show up in the TV's sources menu and do nothing to the files.
This is possible to do by sharing some folders from Windows and the TV can play them over the LAN, exactly like it plays them from a directly connected USB drive. But I don't want to have a full Windows system sitting around doing nothing but pretending to be a network drive for the TV.
The goal is to be able to copy videos to the thing from my desktop, which is nowhere near the livingroom where the TV is, to the video server box, then be able to use the TV's own file browser to select and play the videos.
No logins, no user names, passwords, or space quotas, not accessible from anywhere outside the 192.168.0.xxx LAN. It has to be dead easy to use because some people who use the TV know just enough to operate it to use the sources menu to get to the USB drive. More complexity and they'll just not bother. I want to make my life a bit easier by no longer having to sneakernet videos to the TV on flash drives.
This is possible to do by sharing some folders from Windows and the TV can play them over the LAN, exactly like it plays them from a directly connected USB drive. But I don't want to have a full Windows system sitting around doing nothing but pretending to be a network drive for the TV.
The goal is to be able to copy videos to the thing from my desktop, which is nowhere near the livingroom where the TV is, to the video server box, then be able to use the TV's own file browser to select and play the videos.
No logins, no user names, passwords, or space quotas, not accessible from anywhere outside the 192.168.0.xxx LAN. It has to be dead easy to use because some people who use the TV know just enough to operate it to use the sources menu to get to the USB drive. More complexity and they'll just not bother. I want to make my life a bit easier by no longer having to sneakernet videos to the TV on flash drives.