Universal Media Server | Forum

So I recently bought a Netgear NeoTV Max to use with UMS. When I try to use it, UMS labels it a Vizio Smart TV and no videos will work, it just has the thumbnails that open as jpgs. Audio files do work through UMS as well as video files played off a memory card locally on the device. I'm wondering is there anyway to manually tell UMS what device this is? I can see UMS has a config file for Netgear NeoTV so I'm not sure why it won't use that instead of thinking it's a Vizio tv..

I also made sure UMS had exceptions in windows firewall and even put the device's IP into my router's DMZ to eliminate that as a possibility.

Anyway I honestly have no Idea what to do, I have uploaded a log. Let me know if any additional info is needed. Thanks in advance for any help

You shouldn't add UMS into DMZ in your firewall, it doesn't need incoming access from the internet. The only firewall that needs to be opened is the one on the computer running UMS - Windows Firewall in your case.

When looking in your log file I can see that you use a public IP address (178.195.xxx.xxx) on the computer running UMS. It's probably because you've placed it in the DMZ in the router, but I would stop that immediately. This means that the computer running UMS is reachable from the internet, and UMS and any other software running on it might be attacked from outside. UMS is not "hardened" to protect against direct access from the internet, as this isn't the intended network configuration. The same is probably true for other software running on your computer. When configured correctly, your computer should be behind NAT (the NAT is done in your router) and only use private IP addresses (those are NOT reachable from the internet). This is also why opening the Windows Firewall for UMS isn't a security risk, as the address should already be unreachable from the internet. Not only is UMS using these public IP addresses, it seems that your renderers are as well, which would make them equally exposed. I would recommend you to reconfigure your network ASAP.

In any case, the firewall is only the problem when UMS can't find the renderer or the renderer can't find UMS. The misidentification already shows that your firewall doesn't block the communication.

The reason for the misidentification is quite simple, Vizio-SmartTV.conf has a way too general matching rule based on user-agent: The reason for this is that the Vizio Smart TV (like your Netgear) doesn't have anything unique in the user-agent, so that whoever made that configuration used the little information it sends to be able to recognize it, at the "price" of having a lot of false positives for other renderers. The problem is really with Vizio-SmartTV.conf.

The user-agent sent by the Netgear Neo TV is this: ..which means that the two are indistinguishable by user-agent. The easy way to solve this is that you disable the Vizio Smart TV in UMS' GUI. A more permanent solution would be for somebody to remove the user-agent match from Vizio-SmartTV.conf.

I expect that Netgear-NeoTV.conf will be picked up automatically when the Vizio Smart TV configuration is disabled, but I can't be sure until you have tried it.

This configuration seems to leave a lot to be desired anyway, it doesn't specify which formats/codecs are supported by the Neo TV but simply streams anything with these extensions: As a result I expect you to have a lot of playback problems with this configuration as well. You can search this forum to see if anyone else has made a better configuration for this renderer, or if you can't find it you will find information about how to modify it so that it will work.

I'm not that into renderer configurations, so somebody else will have to help you with that if you can't figure it out, but the first step is to disable the Vizio configuration and reconfigure your network so it's not open from the internet.

Thanks for looking into this for me. I undid everything with the DMZ and firewall, thanks for the heads-up there.

I also disabled the Vizio profile, now it picks it up as an unknown renderer but that's no biggie since it does work now. It can be unknown all it wants as long as it works lol.


Thanks again

When the renderer is "unknown" it uses default settings. If those are fine for you that's great, but you might experience "less than ideal behavior" at some stage when using these default values. If/when that happens, figuring out how to get a renderer configuration working for the NeoTV will be the solution.