Samsung TV / videos / SAMTV PLAYER
REVIEW
SamTV Player is a generic media player on Tizen that does the basics and not much else.
A no-frills video utility for Samsung TVs — plays the common file formats from USB and local sources, with a stripped-back interface and almost no playback controls beyond the essentials.
BY THE APP COMRADE DESK · MAY 11, 2026 · 3 MIN READ
SamTV Player is the kind of app that exists because Samsung’s built-in media browser keeps disappointing people. It is not a streaming service, not a home-theatre front end, not a competitor to Plex or Jellyfin. It is a file player — drop a USB stick into a Tizen TV, point the app at it, and the video starts. That narrow scope is both the appeal and the limit.
The Tizen app store has a handful of generic media players, and SamTV Player sits in the middle of the pack. VLC’s Tizen build covers a wider range of network sources; Kodi is a heavier install with a deeper feature set; Samsung’s own media browser is faster to open but chokes on more codecs. SamTV Player tries to be the path-of-least-resistance option for someone who hit a wall with the built-in browser and doesn’t want to commit to a full media-server stack on their TV.
What it gets right is the basics. Files open, common containers play, subtitles attach when their filenames match. What it doesn’t do is everything around the basics — no SMB, no library, no persistent resume, no metadata. For the audience that wants exactly that and nothing more, it’s a defensible install on a Samsung TV in 2026. For everyone else, the bigger players are a short download away.
SamTV Player is what you reach for when the built-in media browser chokes on a file format and you don't want to install something heavier.
FEATURES
SamTV Player is a third-party video player for Samsung Tizen TVs aimed at users who have run into the limits of Samsung's built-in USB media browser. The pitch is straightforward — open a file, play the file, move on.
The player handles the common containers a generic Tizen viewer is most likely to encounter: MP4, MKV, AVI, MOV, and TS, with H.264 and H.265 decoding handled by the Tizen platform's hardware video stack. Audio passthrough is limited to what the OS exposes to third-party apps, which on modern Samsung sets means AAC and AC3 work reliably; DTS support depends on the specific model and firmware.
Source options are USB storage and DLNA on the local network. There's no cloud-storage integration, no streaming-protocol support beyond DLNA, no Plex or Jellyfin client, and no chromecast-style handoff. Subtitle handling covers external SRT files matched by filename and embedded soft-subs in MKV; styling controls are limited to size and a small set of colours.
The interface is utilitarian — a file browser, a now-playing screen, a progress bar, a small overlay for audio-track and subtitle selection. Resume-from-last-position works within a session but doesn't persist across reboots.
MISSION ACCOMPLISHED
SamTV Player does the one job a generic Tizen player needs to do: it opens files Samsung's built-in media browser refuses to open. MKV files with chapter markers play through without the browser bailing out; AVI files with older codecs surface instead of erroring; H.265 content from a USB drive starts in a couple of seconds.
The footprint is small and the load times are quick on a 2022-or-later Samsung set. There's no account creation, no nag screen, and no upsell to a paid tier. For the narrow audience that wants a side-loaded file player on a TV without committing to a more elaborate media stack, SamTV Player is a defensible install.
ROOM TO IMPROVE
The feature set stops well short of what serious media-server users expect on a TV in 2026. No Plex or Jellyfin clients means anyone running a home media library is going to install those instead and skip this entirely. The lack of network-share support beyond DLNA — no SMB, no NFS, no WebDAV — rules out the most common home-NAS setups. VLC's Tizen build covers most of those gaps and is the obvious comparison.
Subtitle styling is thin, audio-track switching is awkward through the directional pad, and there's no library view, no metadata scraping, no continue-watching list across sessions. Persistent resume points would be the single biggest fix. The app's update cadence is also slow — Tizen utility-app developers often ship one update a year, and SamTV Player feels like one of those.
CONCLUSION
Install SamTV Player if Samsung's built-in USB browser is failing on the file you want to watch and you'd rather not run VLC or Kodi. It's a small, focused tool that does the one thing it claims to do, and the price is right. For anyone running a home media server, a Plex or Jellyfin client on a different platform is the better fit. Worth keeping in mind as a fallback rather than a daily driver.