Sony BRAVIA TV & DLNA formats

As I wrote ear­li­er, I try to get some infos which for­mats my Sony BRAVIA 5800 TV is able to play over the net­work. Sony is not real­ly help­ful (they tell only names some­one with a DLNA spec could cor­rect­ly inter­pret). Now I took the time to move my TV into a dif­fer­ent sub­net (the same where my NAS is in, not like before in a DMZ), and I installed minidl­na. After some net­work sniff­ing, the use of the Intel UPnP Device Spy and some minidlna-source read­ing I have now a bet­ter idea what my Sony TV expects.

The DLNA-specification seems to man­date a MIME-type and some DLNA-specific iden­ti­fi­er which describes the con­tent a play­er (a DLNA-Renderer) is able to dis­play. In the fol­low­ing I will present the MIME-type, the DLNA-identifier, and prob­a­bly a Sony-specific identifier.

Regard­ing pic­tures the TV only accepts JPEGs, bit in small, medi­um and large sizes. I did not both­er to look up what this means in real val­ues, so far this is not of high inter­est for me. For audio the TV accepts MP3s and LPCM (raw PCM sam­ples). The raw sniffed data from the TV looks like this:

image/jpeg:DLNA.ORG_PN=JPEG_SM
image/jpeg:DLNA.ORG_PN=JPEG_MED
image/jpeg:DLNA.ORG_PN=JPEG_LRG
audio/mpeg:DLNA.ORG_PN=MP3
audio/L16:DLNA.ORG_PN=LPCM

The more inter­est­ing part for me is the video part. The TV sup­ports MPEG2 Video (the MPEG_ part in the DLNA.ORG_PN) and H.264 (the AVC_ part in the DLNA.ORG_PN). For MPEG2 it sup­ports pro­gram streams (PS in DLNA.ORG_PN) and trans­port streams (TS in DLNA.ORG_PN). For PS it sup­ports PAL and NTSC res­o­lu­tions (720×576 is PAL, HD res­o­lu­tions like 720p or 1080i or 1080p are not sup­port­ed). The packet-length of a trans­port steam can be 188 bytes or 192 bytes. If the width is >= 1288 or the height is >= 720, minidl­na adds HD in DLNA.ORG_PN, else it will add SD. The EU in DLNA.ORG_PN is for SD video with a height of 576 or 288 pix­els. Depend­ing of the com­bi­na­tion of the packet-length and if there is a time­stamp in use or not, the DLNA.ORG_PN will have a _ISO or a _T appended.

It also sup­ports H.264. The DLNA.ORG_PN starts with a AVC in this case. Only trans­port streams (TS  in DLNA.ORG_PN) is sup­port­ed. As with MPEG2, the packet-length of the TS can be 188 or 192 bytes. Depend­ing of the com­bi­na­tion of the packet-length and if there is a time­stamp in use or not, the DLNA.ORG_PN will have a _ISO or a _T append­ed. Depend­ing on the pro­file used, minidl­na adds some more infos to the DLNA.ORG_PN, BL if it is a baseline-profile, MP if it is a main-profile, and HP if it is a high-profile. I do not see this in the valid video for­mats my TV request­ed over the wire. As with the MPEG2 for­mat, SD or HD is added (in minidl­na) depend­ing on the width and height, but also on the bitrate of the video. For the main-profile the width has to be <= 720, the height <= 576 and the bitrate <= 10M (base 10, not base 2) for SD, and the width has to be <=1920, the height <= 1152 and the bitrate <= 20M (base 10, not base 2) for HD. For the high-profile the width has to be <=1920, the height <=1152, the bitrate <= 30M (base 10, not base 2) and the audio has to be AC3 to get the HD added in DLNA.ORG_PN. The audio is spec­i­fied in DLNA.ORG_PN as MPEG1_L3 for MP3, AC3 for AC3, and AAC or AAC_MULT5 for AAC (stereo or 5‑channel). As can be seen below, the TV seems only to sup­port AC3 audio for AVC. The TV also has _24_, _50_ and _60_ in DLNA.ORG_PN. I did not find those things in the minidl­na source (but I have not real­ly searched for this). I could imag­ine that _24_ stands for 24 pic­tures per sec­ond, and the _50_ and _60_ for pro­gres­sive videos (with 50 respec­tive­ly 60 pic­tures per sec­ond), but this is pure spec­u­la­tion from my side. Here is the raw sniffed data:

video/mpeg:DLNA.ORG_PN=AVC_TS_HD_24_AC3_ISO;SONY.COM_PN=AVC_TS_HD_24_AC3_ISO
video/vnd.dlna.mpeg-tts:DLNA.ORG_PN=AVC_TS_HD_24_AC3;SONY.COM_PN=AVC_TS_HD_24_AC3
video/vnd.dlna.mpeg-tts:DLNA.ORG_PN=AVC_TS_HD_24_AC3_T;SONY.COM_PN=AVC_TS_HD_24_AC3_T

video/vnd.dlna.mpeg-tts:DLNA.ORG_PN=MPEG_PS_PAL
video/vnd.dlna.mpeg-tts:DLNA.ORG_PN=MPEG_PS_NTSC

video/vnd.dlna.mpeg-tts:DLNA.ORG_PN=MPEG_TS_SD_50_L2_T
video/vnd.dlna.mpeg-tts:DLNA.ORG_PN=MPEG_TS_SD_60_L2_T
video/mpeg:DLNA.ORG_PN=MPEG_TS_SD_EU_ISO
video/vnd.dlna.mpeg-tts:DLNA.ORG_PN=MPEG_TS_SD_EU
video/vnd.dlna.mpeg-tts:DLNA.ORG_PN=MPEG_TS_SD_EU_T
video/vnd.dlna.mpeg-tts:DLNA.ORG_PN=MPEG_TS_SD_50_AC3_T
video/vnd.dlna.mpeg-tts:DLNA.ORG_PN=MPEG_TS_SD_60_AC3_T
video/mpeg:DLNA.ORG_PN=MPEG_TS_HD_50_L2_ISO;SONY.COM_PN=HD2_50_ISO
video/mpeg:DLNA.ORG_PN=MPEG_TS_HD_60_L2_ISO;SONY.COM_PN=HD2_60_ISO
video/vnd.dlna.mpeg-tts:DLNA.ORG_PN=MPEG_TS_HD_50_L2_T;SONY.COM_PN=HD2_50_T
video/vnd.dlna.mpeg-tts:DLNA.ORG_PN=MPEG_TS_HD_60_L2_T;SONY.COM_PN=HD2_60_T

video/mpeg:DLNA.ORG_PN=AVC_TS_HD_50_AC3_ISO;SONY.COM_PN=AVC_TS_HD_50_AC3_ISO
video/mpeg:DLNA.ORG_PN=AVC_TS_HD_60_AC3_ISO;SONY.COM_PN=AVC_TS_HD_60_AC3_ISO
video/vnd.dlna.mpeg-tts:DLNA.ORG_PN=AVC_TS_HD_50_AC3;SONY.COM_PN=AVC_TS_HD_50_AC3
video/vnd.dlna.mpeg-tts:DLNA.ORG_PN=AVC_TS_HD_60_AC3;SONY.COM_PN=AVC_TS_HD_60_AC3
video/vnd.dlna.mpeg-tts:DLNA.ORG_PN=AVC_TS_HD_50_AC3_T;SONY.COM_PN=AVC_TS_HD_50_AC3_T
video/vnd.dlna.mpeg-tts:DLNA.ORG_PN=AVC_TS_HD_60_AC3_T;SONY.COM_PN=AVC_TS_HD_60_AC3_T

video/x-mp2t-mphl-188

So far I did not get the time to exper­i­ment with this. I also have the impres­sion that minidl­na has still some rough edges (the sin­tel video I used to test before with a dif­fer­ent media serv­er, does not show up in the list with minidlna).

4 thoughts on “Sony BRAVIA TV & DLNA formats”

  1. THeNymf says:

    dude, this is awe­some! i have exact­ly the same prob­lem, i want to stream direct­ly from my NAS..!

    how i can enter your MIME types in a way my NAS + Bravia understands?

    default (syn­ol­o­gy) Nas mime types are:
    avi=video/x‑ms-video,wav=audio/x‑wav

    and the NAS uses ffm­peg for transcod­ing and streaming

    1. netchild says:

      Try it with a bug-report to Syn­ol­o­gy, or install a dif­fer­ent DLNA (upnp-av) serv­er on it. What is dis­played in this post­ing are not real­ly MIME types (they are not detailed enough), the most impor­tant parts here are DLNA or upnp-av types. The DLNA serv­er on your NAS needs to be able to under­stand the types the TV requests.

      What I try to do is to find the right for­mats the TV is able to play, and a DLNA serv­er which is deliv­er­ing this with­out transcod­ing or re-encoding. The ratio­nale is, that if I take a DVD and gen­er­ate a file for stream­ing to my TV any­way, I want to have the right for­mat direct­ly, this way the DLNA serv­er does not need to spend ener­gy to gen­er­ate the right for­mat each time the file is watched.

  2. Hamza.T says:

    Fan­tas­tic job! i’ll be using this to transcode for my new­er 2012 line­up 40HX750. hard to find info like this on the inter­net. thanks!

  3. Gerrith says:

    Syn­ol­o­gy did a great job by pro­vid­ing apps to stream to an Apple TV or direct to our TV. They also descrip­ing clear­ly, you’ll need a TV who is able to rec­og­nize most of the for­mats we have for pic­tures and movies today. So find­ing this par­tic­u­lar tele­vi­sion can be a real chal­lenge. Not sure Sony has the one we look­ing for.… 😉

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