Media supported by Samsung 50HU6900 4K TV

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4 min. reading

Three months ago I have purchased my first 4K / UHD TV — Samsung 50HU6900 — and after some time I tried to used the built-in media player to play some of my files. At the very end it turned out that — as in all Samsung devices — this is a piece of crap, full of some strange limitations. Finally, I have reverted back to my old, good standalone FHD player and I’m using Samsung one only for UHD / 4K files.

But, for all of you, that aren’t so reluctant, here is a list of media supported by this TV (and probably many more Samsung TVs) and all the limitations, you need to fulfill in order to have your media played.

Disks and pendrives

Any external disk or pendrive connected to Samsung 50HU6900 TV must be partitioned to one partition. This single partition must be in NTFS format.

Media with more partitions or partitions in other file format may be supported, but this is not guaranteed.

There are strange limits to number of files and folders:

  1. You can’t have more than 1000 files in each folder.
  2. Total number of all files and folders on entire disk can’t be larger than 8000 items.

If you break any of these numbers, you may face some problems:

  • additional files and folders might not be seen by TV,
  • entire disk or pendrive can work very unstable,
  • disk or pendrive may be not recognized at all.

Audio codecs

Here is the list of audio codecs supported by Samsung 50HU6900 in video files:

  • Dolby Digital,
  • LPCM,
  • ADPCM (IMA, MS),
  • AAC,
  • HE-AAC,
  • WMA,
  • Dolby Digital Plus,
  • MPEG (MP3),
  • DTS (Core, LBR),
  • G.711 (A-Law, u-Law).

FLAC audio code, popular in 4K/UHD movies is not supported. Samsung support says something about partial support as dual channel audio file, but as audio codec in video file this audio code is not supported.

If you have a multi-audio video file (i.e. more than one language audio track embed into container that supports it, like .mkv) then you won’t be able to play any other audio-track than first one. No button on remote controller, no option in player itself, nothing.

This is as weak as it can be. Most of my videos has single audio track only. But, if there are certain with multi audios then — probably due to fact that some moron has encoded them — English audio track is nearly always second or third one. First one, in most occasions, is Italian, Hungarian, Chinese etc.

With inability of changing audio track in this dully weak media player, you’ll be forced to watch your movie with audio track that you don’t understand.

Subtitles

Samsung 50HU6900 has a very limited support for subtitles!

It reads only .srt files and only first one. If you have more than one subtitle (either embed into container that supports multi-subs, like .mkv or as separate files like Movie.srt and Movie [Deutsch].srt) only first will be auto-selected by TV’s video player.

There is no way / option to change or select another subtitle. Again — no button on remote controller, no option in player itself, nothing.

Conclusion

Inability of changing audio track or subtitle is the biggest disadvantage and disappointment for me. Most of my videos are multi-language. Because of lack of this feature in Samsung 50HU6900 I was forced to revert myself back to old, good, five years old Full HD media player.

The designers of this device were not as morons as Samsung engineers and managed to add Audio and Subtitle buttons to remote controller.

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