Universal Media Server | Forum

Hello,
I have a new Samsung TV that can also play 360° material. That's a cool thing, you can look around during the video with the remote control. The footage comes from my Insta X3. The material has a resolution of 5760x2880, but the TV only supports a maximum of 4096x2160. That's why I've been saving the material scaled with ffmpeg. The Universal Media Server also supports transcoding. I have now also managed to watch the videos transcoded using the ffmpeg encoder, but unfortunately I cannot switch to 360° mode. I strongly suspect that this is only possible if the videos are in the mp4 container. But UMS transcodes to mpg! How can I tell UMS in the config that it should use the mp4 container? Unfortunately there are only the MPEGTS profiles. Maybe it works somehow with the CustomFFmpegOptions?

I'm not sure about this but I suspect the TV needs direct access to the video file and transcoding will remove all the info it needs.
It should work if the video is streamed though but may need some extra info to know the file is a 360 video.

If the resolution is higher than what the TV can play then I don't think it can work. You will probably have to convert your videos yourself to a lower resolution so they can be streamed. I did find this cheat sheet that may be helpful if you need to transcode them yourself.

I know very little about the transcoding process so you might be able to find some custom options that will work but I think for the output to be over the network you have to use MPEGTS but can use the h264 or h265 codec. Have a look at DefaultRenderer.conf for more info on the profiles you can use.

Of course the only way to play the media is to transcode it to 4096p. So far I have done this myself and it works. I have recoded the videos to mp4. The problem is that I now need more storage space as I now have two versions. So I wanted to transcode the videos on the fly with UMS. I have already tried various parameters, but the transcoded video always has the file extension mpg. The TV only supports mp4, otherwise I can't press the 360° button. I do not believe that the metadata are necessary, because I can also switch flat mp4 videos to 360°. This makes no sense but it works.So I assume that 360° works only with mp4 container?!