Smart TV is a good thing for multi-purpose. You can easily connect your smart tv display with your smartphone or else even with DVD players. These things are quite common but the real purpose of this post is to let you connect the display of your smart tv with your laptop i-e the Macbook and do that even wirelessly. Streaming media content to the smart TV is quite fun and this can serve you a complete home cinema experience at the same time, the whole family and group of friends can sit together to enjoy one piece of the movie. This post aims to solve the DLNA issue of connecting the MacBook to the smart TV and using the smart tv as the second big display for your videos synced through a laptop.
Sharing Your Mac/OS X Laptop Media with Smart TV:
Every smart TV has options to access the shared media content on the internet device which you are using. Like suppose you are using a wireless router to connect your laptop and smartphone on the internet, then you can use the same wireless router to share your videos, music and photos with your LED or Smart TV also, whether that is a Sony Bravia, a Samsung one or else an LG Smart TV, that doesn’t matter but the thing is that the TV which is needed to be connected must be a smart TV / LED. Following is the process to play some high-quality videos, music and photos on your smart TV:
- Mac mini media server: how to connect a Mac mini to your TV Macs are superb for any context – including in the living room acting as a hub for your video and music enjoyment.
- Plex Media Server. Plex Media Server is the software that allows you to stream your content to all of your devices, anywhere.
1- You need a laptop which has Mac OS X running on it.
Sundtek Streamingserver a native macOS TV Server providing DVB, ATSC and ISDB-T via UPnP/DLNA, it also supports streaming media files (it only supports TV devices from Sundtek). FireStream by Cyaneous, Inc., a commercial UPnP/DLNA media server for macOS with advanced transcoding capabilities, per-device profiles and native Mac media organization.
Download Vuze for the OS X, and install the program. OS X has probably the easiest way of installing any software or application.
3- After installing Vuze, just run the software. It’s actually a downloading application for torrents file at the same time. But the good thing which it has is the DLNA feature which makes your laptop a media server, making the video files available to your smart tv mentioned in your laptop. Thus, it means you can play the songs present in your laptop to the big screen.
4- After launching Vuze, you need to turn on the media server feature. For that look at the side panel (of software Vuze), and there you will see that your TV has been detected along with it’s applied IP address. (Be sure that you have connected your smart TV with the wireless router of your home network and also your laptop must be connected to the same network)
See at the screenshot, you’ll see that a Bravia tv has been detected. I have already enabled the device playback feature. Once you install Vuze you need to turn on the device playback feature.
5- Now, just you need to select the TV device and then, just drag and drop the videos which you want to make available on the network and the TV in the end.
6- Access the network and USB feature of your TV using the smart remote. And there you will see the Vuze media server, select that and wait for a second after some time you will see your shared videos from a laptop on the TV. That’s it , Enjoy playing videos from laptop to your sony bravia, samsung or else LG smart TV.
Update: Learn This Another Technique to Share Your Mac Screen Wirelessly With Your TV
For owners who are running the following LG television models, you can run the Plex app on LG TV for streaming and enjoying all your local content on LG TV in your living room with Plex’s gorgeous interface. How about streaming personal 4K content to LG TV via Plex?
“I’ve recently bought a new LG 4K TV. I’ve downloaded quite a few demo 4K, HDR files etc. These files play fine from the TV’s USB ports (USB 2.0 and 3.0). I have installed PLEX on my NAS and on my TV and see the files fine. However when I try watching them a few seconds plays then it stops like its buffering. So should the 453 Pro be struggling with this type of task – a single 4K stream via PLEX?”
Why Plex app buffering when play the 4K files?
Above questions shows that since the 4K files are not supported by the Plex app for LG TV, therefore, the Plex Media Server installed on NAS tries to transcode the 4K file. However, it is well known that transcoding is the most CPU-intensive option of how content can be handled, in addition, very few include the QNAP TS-453 Pro NA devices container powerful processors, which can have a significant impact on your experience using Plex Media Server to perform the transcoding.
Supported file formats by LG TV Plex app
To fix the video buffering issue, it would be much ideal for you to transcode unsupported 4K MKV to LG TV Plex app 100% compatible file formats, so that you can direct stream the files to LG TV via Plex without no transcoding.
From Plex’s support page, we get the information that you can direct play file formats that meet the following standard on LG TV with Plex app.
Video formats:
ASF container with vc1 or wmv3 video encoding
MKV container with H.264 video encoding
MPEG-TS container with mpeg2video video encoding
ASF container with vc1 or wmv3 video encoding
MKV container with H.264 video encoding
MPEG-TS container with mpeg2video video encoding
Audio formats:
ASF container with wmav2 audio encoding
OGG container with vorbis audio encoding
ASF container with wmav2 audio encoding
OGG container with vorbis audio encoding
From above lists, we can see that currently, 4K playback support is still by available for the Plex app on LG TV. You can only direct play video with a maximum resolution of 1980*1020 that meet the standards above on LG TV Plex app.
Transcode and compress 4K video for LG TV Plex app playing
To smoothly stream 4K to LG TV via Plex, it would be much idea for you to decode and downscale unsupported 4K to LG TV Plex app native playback formats listed above with a third-party video conversion app. Here, you can get the job easily done by downloading our powerful 4K Video Converter - Pavtube Video Converter Ultimate.
The program has full importing support for all 4K video wrapped with different container file formats such as 4K AVI, 4K WMV, 4K MP4, 4K MKV, 4K TS, 4K MXF, 4K XAVC, 4K XAVC S and 4K compression codec like 4K H.264, 4K H.265 and 4K Prores, etc. Thanks to its batch conversion mode, you can input many 4K files at one time for conversion to save your precious time. The tool can assist you to efficiently compress and convert 4K video to LG TV Plex app direct playback 1080p or 720p H.264 MKV file formats or other formats with splendid file quality.
Related article: LG TV MKV Solution | LG TV MP4 Solution | Play AVI on LG TV from USB
Tips: The application upports hard-ware encoding acceleration, you can up to 6x faster H.264 codec encoding speed as long as you run your computer on Graphic Cards that supports Nvidia CUDA or AMD App technology.
To get LG TV Plex app readable audio formats or codec, just click “Settings”, in the opened “Profile Settings” window, from “audio codec” drop-down list, choose LG TV Plex app readable audio formats such as AAC. You can also tweak other profile setting such as video codec, resolution, bit rate, frame rate, audio codec, bit rate, sample rate, channels, etc as you like to get better output video and audio quality according to your own needs.
For Mac users, download Pavtube iMedia Converter for Mac to complete file transocding and compression process on macOS High Sierra, macOS Sierra, Mac OS X El Capitan, Mac OS X Yosemite, Mac OS X Mavericks, etc.
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Step by Step to Convert and Compress 4K Video for LG TV Plex App Direct Playing
Step 1: Load 4K video into the program.
Download the free trial version of the program. Launch it on your computer. Click “File” menu and select “Add Video/Audio” or click the “Add Video” button on the top tool bar to import 4K video files into the program.
Step 2: Output LG TV Plex app supported file formats.
Clicking the Format bar, from its drop-down list, select LG TV Plex app playable H.264 HD MKV file formats by following the steps below:
Choose “MKV HD Video(*.mkv)” under “HD Video” main category, then click “Settings”, to pop out the “Profile Settings” Window, in the video section, from “Codec” drop-down option, choose “H.264″.
Step 3: Select LG TV Plex app playable audio codec.
Mac Media Server For Lg Tv Screen
In the opened “Profile Settings” window, from “Codec” drop-down list, select LG TV Plex app playable “aac” audio codec to output. You can also flexibly change other profile settings according to your own needs.
Lg Tv Mac Address Location
Step 4: Start the conversion process.
Click the “Start conversion” button on the main interface and the software will start to downscale and decode 4K video to LG TV Plex app compatible HD file formats immediately.
Mac Media Server For Lg Tvs
When the conversion is finished, click “Open” to find the converted video files. Then feel free to upload converted files to NAS, setup Plex Media Server on QNAP NAS for streaming movies to LG TV.