Can Samsung PN50A650 play .mkv files via USB drive ?

Enjoy/watch Blu-ray movies on HDTV via WD TV



Want to find a solution to playback Blu-ray movies on your widescreen TV via WD HD Media Player? As a matter of fact, WD TV HD Media Player promises to play just about any video format you throw at it, including high definition video up to 1080p. You put the videos on any USB mass storage device, like an external hard drive or a thumb drive, and plug it into the device, WD TV HD Media Player will recognize the files on the drive and play any video, audio, or photo files it finds. However, according to the feedback provided by some users, WD TV HD Media Player does play m2ts selectively only, some are, and some are not. In purpose of solving this problem, this post will talk about how to rip Blu-ray movies to USB for playback on TV via WD TV HD Media Player.

WD TV HD Media Player supported file formats:

Video: MPEG1/2/4, WMV9, AVI (MPEG4, Xvid, AVC), H.264, MKV, MOV (MPEG4, H.264), Subtitle SRT (UTF-8)

Audio: MP3, WMA, OGG, WAV/PCM/LPCM, AAC, FLAC, Dolby Digital, AIF/AIFF, MKA Playlist PLS, M3U, WPL

Photo: JPEG, GIF, TIF/TIFF, BMP, PNG

Now let’s have a look at its operation steps.

Choose MKV format, how to rip Blu-ray to MKV?

Step 1
Download, install and run this Blu-ray ripping software
After launched it, you will see the following interface at once. There are three ways provided to import Blu-ray files, namely through clicking on "DVD Rom", "DVD Folder", and "IFO/ISO".

Step 2
Load the Blu-ray disc.
Click on the “DVD Rom” button to import Blu-ray movie from the disc, or click on “DVD Folder” button and browse to your target files. It takes a few seconds to load the whole movie, so be patient. A view log will pop up when loading process completes, you can simply click "OK" to confirm or press Ctrl+O to close it. Now all the M2TS files in file list are checked, right-click and choose "Uncheck All". What you need is the main movie---the one with longest duration. Check it and leave unwanted M2TS files unchecked. You can rename the output file by clicking on the file name in Destination File column. Right below the file list you could find "Subtitle" and "Audio" droplist, where you can set output subtitles and dubbings to the languages you like.



Step 3
Click on Format bar, select “Common Video” from the format list and in submenu you could find MKV video format. If you would like to maintain best quality, just back to the format list and move down your mouse to point at “HD Video”, here you can find “MKV HD Video”. Check it and hit on the small folder icon to specify an output folder. Then click “Settings” and customize advanced audio and video parameters. For instance, you may set Video to 1920*1080p (to fit for the wide screen), 25mbps, 30fps, and Audio to AC3/AAC codec, 192kbps, 5.1 channels. Click "OK" to confirm your settings.


Step 4. Start conversion.

Click on the “Convert” button and the program will rip Blu-ray movies to MKV video format for you very soon. You could set auto shutdown in progress window (it pops up once you click Convert) or leave it there and come back later (the ripper will tell you how long it takes). Enjoy the converted MKV videos!

Once finished, you can get the generated files for WD TV via clicking on "Open" button with ease. Afterwards, just copy the output files to My Passport portable hard drive or other USB drive, and then connect WD TV to your TV, plug your USB drive into the player and you are ready to enjoy the movies ripped from your Blu-rays.

That's all, Enjoy it!

To play Blu-ray ISO backups on your WD TV Live, one thing you should know is that WD TV Live can well play ISO files from a USB drive, while network shares do have problems actually.
In order to get an ISO backup, what’s your workflow? As all I know, some people use tsMuxeR to back up the Blu-ray disc, and then converted it into an ISO using Daemon Tools. Personally, I use Pavtube Blu-ray Copy to make ISO backups for my Blu-ray discs.
Within several clicks, this program can finish its task, and enables you to get an ISO image file. What you should do is just loading your BD files via "Source" option, and then choose "Image File (*.ISO)" from the pull down menu of "Target" to specify the destination folder. BTW, you’d better indicate your USB drive as the save path, or you need spend time to copy the ISO image to your USB drive repeatedly. Once the two steps finished, the backup process will begin, and then you just need wait for the resulted ISO files for your WD TV Live.

As long as copying task is completed, plug the USB into your WD TV, and connect it to your HDTV via HDMI cable, what you should do next is enjoying your BD movies on your widescreen TV leisurely.
One more thing I should mention is that some users have problems to play Blu-ray ISO files via their WD TV, but DVD ISO is working well. Not clear about the accurate reason, but another solution can be recommended. Since WD TV is able to beautifully playback HD MKV files up to Full HD 1080p, thus we just need a utility to convert BD files to HD MKV, and then everything will be OK. Because of the Blu-ray copyright issues, some discs are highly protected, we must take advantage of a powerful application to do so. In that case, the following Blu-ray ripper is suggested, it is able to remove nearly all kinds of BD protections, including BD+, AACS, and even MKB Version > 10 is supported as well.
This Blu-ray ripper allows users exporting "MKV HD Video (*.mkv)" format, and also enables users to reset audio and video parameters via clicking "Settings" button. You can set the resolution at 1920*1080 to remain 1080p quality of your Blu-ray movies, as well as keep 5.1 channel of the original surround sound. All in all, all the parameters like bit rate, codec name, frame rate, sample rate are all changeable in the following interface.

After your preferred settings for your WD TV have been set well, just click "Convert" button to start conversion. Once finished, you can watch them on your TV via WD TV with ease, and the high quality of the Blu-ray movie has never been changed at all.
Is this helpful? Hope it is.