Serviio

I've had Serviio running for years and it's worked great with my Sony BDP S5100 blu-ray player using the BDP-SX100 profile very slightly tweaked. The Sony blu-ray is the front-end for my old dumb TV.

Just got a Vizio E601i "smart" TV that can see DLNA servers, and it sees all my folders that Serviio is presenting, but no content within those folders.
Same folders/files as the Sony blu-ray works with. This may just be a limit of Vizio's DLNA implementation, but the TV can see and even play the same files from the same folders when I use Windows Media Server as the DLNA server (this is all running on Windows 10). Unfortunately I can't force WMS to transcode like I need it to, the Vizio is very limited in the video/audio codecs it can handle. I tried Plex and it works just like WMS, the Vizio can see and play files OK, subject to codec limitations.

So what would be causing the Vizio TV to not see folder content in Serviio? I've tried profiles 'Vizio', 'Generic DLNA' and 'Sony BDP-SX100', stopping & restarting the Serviio service each time but same result. Serviio server settings for presentation in the 'Video' category for the 'Folders' entry is set to 'Display content only', this has been working fine for years and still works for the Sony blu-ray. Most other metadata entries are disabled since normally I just browse by folder.

Any suggestions greatly appreciated.

I have a couple of Vizio TVs that I use as computer monitors. I looked at their DLNA functionality and it's terrible, to say the least. I've never really looked at their capabilities, so can't say for certain what might work. Serviio usually doesn't display media that the protocol reports as unplayable, so for whatever reason your media doesn't fall within their supported codecs/containers and the profiles you've tried doesn't offer transcoding for them.

First thing I'd try is a few other TV profiles. There's a number of Sony TVs listed, and the Roku TV profiles might work as well, since Roku is also a limited codec supporting system. What we're looking for is a profile that shows at least some playable files, then go from there.

Thanks for the thoughts, I'll probably play profile-roulette for a while. I get what you're saying about unplayable, but there are some files (xvid within a MP4 container saved as an .avi file) that play just fine when served by WMS or Plex, but even those won't appear when served by Serviio. Like you said, terrible DLNA support.

Maybe one clue though, I saw a posting about ".mpg" getting appended to files specific to a Vizio TV, I think. When I look at an streaming source I set up in Serviio to watch hockey (from nhl_games, replacement for lazyman), it shows the name I set up "NHL stream 1" plus ".mpg" on the end. On my sony blu-ray which works fine, it does not put that .mpg on the end of the stream name.

So I don't know if that's meaningful, but it's interesting. Where is that coming from? Serviio or Vizio? And is it causing or contributing to this problem?

Edit: found a thread about some maybe similar Vizio problems, the poster ended up using KooraRoo media server but some of the symptoms sound familiar viewtopic.php?t=15510
I'd rather stick with Serviio but getting my TV to even display the files is step 1. Off to the profile lumberyard...

2nd Edit: maybe for future generations...KooraRoo works even though, the Vizio forces '.mpg' after the filename when displaying files. But that's display-only, so the file name is still named .mkv or whatever. KooraRoo has some Vizio profiles and when I pick one (Mpeg2, 1080P) it transcodes the file and everything works. Weirdly, the TV menu is displaying the 'title' metadata tag contents if any and if that's blank, then it displays the filename from what I can figure out.

So Serviio "should" work if I can A) get the Vizio to actually display the contents of the folder on the computer and B) find a profile that works to trigger transcoding.

3rd Edit: and now the ritual forehead-slap of shame. Vizio profile works OK, filenames appear as they should. When I switched the TV from wired to wifi, and it got a new IP address, I forgot so I was messing with profiles on the old IP address and had left the new one at generic DLNA device. Oh boy. Now all I have to do is get the online stream to work that is passed by vlc player but that might be just a requirement for VLC to do the transcoding since I'm guessing Serviio doesn't transcode online streams that are passed on to the smart TV client.