In several previous posts I wrote about my quest for the right source format to stream video to my Sony BRAVIA TV (build in 2009). The last week-end I finally found something which satisfies me.
What I found was serviio, a free UPnP-AV (DLNA) server. It is written in java and runs on Windows, Linux and FreeBSD (it is not listed on the website, but we have an not-so-up-to-date version in the ports tree). If necessary it transcodes the input to an appropriate format for the DLNA renderer (in my case the TV).
I tested it with my slow Netbook, so that I was able to see with which input format it will just remux the input container to a MPEG transport stream, and which input format would be really re-encoded to a format the TV understands.
The bottom line of the tests is, that I just need to use a supported container (like MKV or MP4 or AVI) with H.264-encoded video (e.g. encoded by x264) and AC3 audio.
The TV is able to chose between several audio streams, but I have not tested if serviio is able to serve files with multiple audio streams (my wife has a different mother language than me, so it is interesting for us to have multiple audio streams for a movie), and I do not know if DLNA supports something like this.
Now I just have to replace minidlna (which only works good with my TV for MP3s and Pictures) with serviio on my FreeBSD file server and we can forget about the disk-juggling.
