Watch the movies on your PC, on your TV

The short answer: if the two are in the same room, use HDMI. If they are not, a network share gives you the file exactly as it is on disk, and that is the only method on this list where the picture you see is the picture you have.

Why DLNA disappoints, and it is not your setup

DLNA is the built-in "media server" option in Windows, and on paper it is perfect: turn it on, the TV sees a library, done. In practice three things go wrong and none of them are fixable from your end.

1. It transcodes. If the TV cannot decode a format, the PC re-encodes on the fly. That costs quality, it costs CPU, and on a laptop it costs battery and fan noise. If the PC cannot keep up, you get stuttering that looks like a network problem and is not.
2. Seeking is unreliable. Jumping to the middle of a film often restarts it, hangs, or drops the connection, because the server is streaming rather than serving a file.
3. Subtitles usually do not survive. A separate .srt beside the film is invisible to most DLNA setups, and embedded subtitle tracks are frequently dropped in transcoding.

DLNA is fine for photos and music. For films it is the method people try first and abandon.

Why casting is not the same thing

Casting from a browser tab or from an app sends a re-encoded copy of what is on your screen, or asks a streaming service to play directly. For a film sitting on your own hard drive it is the wrong tool: quality drops, the sending device has to stay awake and working the whole time, and anything that interrupts the sender interrupts the film.

Casting earns its place with online video. For your own files it is a downgrade.

The network share, which is the one that actually works

Instead of the PC pushing a stream, the television opens the file directly, the same way it would from a USB stick. Nothing is re-encoded, seeking is instant, and subtitle files sitting next to the film are just files in the same folder.

On the Windows PC, once:

1. Right click the folder with your films, choose Properties, then Sharing, then Share.
2. Make sure the network profile is Private, not Public. This is the single most common reason a TV never finds the PC.
3. Note the PC's IP address. In PowerShell, ipconfig shows it, something like 192.168.1.42.

On the television, open your player app, add a network location or SMB source, and enter that address. Most players want it as smb://192.168.1.42.

If Windows refuses, our Windows network errors page covers every message it can produce, including the profile and firewall settings behind most of them.

The most common complaint, and it is nearly always one of five things. In the order worth checking:

1. The TV is on a different Wi-Fi network. This is the biggest single cause. A television set up on the guest network, or on a second network name from a mesh system, cannot reach the PC at all. 2.4GHz and 5GHz of the same network are fine. MyHome and MyHome-Guest are not.
2. The Windows network profile is Public. Windows hides the PC completely on a public network. It sometimes switches back on its own after a router change or a driver update.
3. The router has client isolation on. Also called AP isolation or wireless isolation. Devices cannot see each other while the internet works perfectly, and some routers ship with it enabled.
4. The Windows firewall is blocking incoming file sharing.
5. You are waiting for the PC to appear in a list. Most TV players will let you type the address directly. Do that first: smb://192.168.1.42. If it connects, only the browsing list was broken, which is a far smaller problem.

The TV asks for a user name and password

It should. Modern Windows refuses anonymous guest connections by default, and has since Windows 10 version 1709, so a television with the user name field left empty is turned away.

Use a real Windows account and its password. Two details that waste evenings:

• The account must have a password. Windows will not accept a network logon for an account with a blank one.
• If the PC signs in with a Microsoft account, the user name is the full email address, and the password is the Microsoft account password. Never the PIN. A PIN unlocks the machine locally and does not exist as far as the network is concerned.

The full explanation is on our Windows network errors page.

It plays, then stutters or buffers

The file is reaching the television, so sharing and permissions are correct. This is throughput, and it has a short list of causes.

1. Wi-Fi to the television. A 4K film can want 40 to 80 Mbit per second sustained, and a remux far more. A television at the far end of the house on 2.4GHz will not hold that, however fast your internet is. An Ethernet cable to the television is the single biggest improvement available and it costs almost nothing.
2. The PC went to sleep or its disk spun down. Playback stalls part way and then recovers or dies.
3. Something is transcoding. If you are on DLNA, see above. A share does not transcode.
4. The film is on an external USB drive on the PC, and that drive is the bottleneck rather than the network.

A quick way to tell throughput from format: skip to the middle. If it plays cleanly for a few seconds then stalls again, it is throughput. If it fails identically wherever you skip to, it is the file.

Subtitles do not appear

1. Keep the subtitle file next to the film and give it the same name. Film.mkv and Film.srt in the same folder is what almost every player looks for.
2. Language suffixes are fine and often better: Film.en.srt, Film.he.srt.
3. DLNA usually will not show them at all. This is one of the clearest reasons to use a share instead.
4. Hebrew, Arabic, Russian and Greek subtitles that appear as nonsense are an encoding problem, not a player problem. Open the file in a text editor and save it as UTF-8.

The file will not play at all

Sound but no picture, picture but no sound, or an immediate error means the television's decoder does not handle that format. The television, not the network.

• Sound missing on an MKV is usually DTS or TrueHD audio, which many televisions cannot decode.
• No picture on a 4K file is often HEVC or 10-bit that the panel's decoder will not take.
• A player app with its own decoders solves most of this, because it does the work itself rather than handing the file to the television's chip.

This is worth knowing before blaming your network: a file that fails the same way at every position, on a share that opens instantly, is a format problem.

Mirroring the whole screen instead

Different job, worth separating. Playing a file means the television reads it directly and your PC is just storage. Mirroring means the television shows whatever is on the computer's screen right now, which is what you want for a browser, a photo album, a game or helping somebody.

Mirroring costs more: the screen has to be captured, compressed and sent continuously, so it is sensitive to Wi-Fi in a way that playing a file is not. For a film, always play the file.

HearthWire TV does both, and its screen sharing carries the computer's sound as well, which most mirroring setups leave silent.

Worth being clear, because "smart TV" covers several unrelated systems and most articles are vague about it.

Network shares work on nearly everything, through a player app that supports SMB. That includes Android TV and Google TV, Samsung and LG sets through their own apps, and every streaming box.

Our own app is Android TV and Google TV only. That covers Sony, TCL, Philips, Xiaomi, Nvidia Shield, Chromecast with Google TV and most streaming boxes. It does not run on Samsung Tizen or LG webOS, which are different systems entirely. If you have one of those, everything else on this page still applies and you want a player app from your TV's own store.

Everything above is Windows file sharing, which works and asks you to get several settings right on both sides.

HearthWire TV is our app for Android TV and Google TV. It finds the computers in your home by itself, shows the folders they share, and plays the films directly from them with no transcoding and no server to configure. It also shows a computer's screen on the television, with sound.

You install HearthWire on the PC and the TV app on the television, and they find each other. There is no cloud, no account, and nothing to set up on the router.

HearthWire TV The Windows app