Enabling PVR features on TV: The Saga Begins

fade

fade

Staff member
Sooo.... I got this new TV (Samsung KS8000), and I got really excited, because it has built-in PVR features, including pausing and rewinding live TV. Real friggin' neato. The problem is that due to crappy legal stuff which probably involves companies like Tivo slipping checks to congress, these features are disabled on US and Canada models.

Disabled, it says, but not removed. The buttons are still there. If I click, they say "Not Available". I seriously doubt it's deeply disabled, so I did some research. Sure enough, all you need to do is change the TV's locale to reenable the features. Supposedly "carribean" is a good setting.

Problem is, docs are scarce. There's some Konami code you can put in during setup to bring up a locale menu that I find in some forum posts. For this TV, it's mute, volume up, channel up, mute during the Terms and Conditions screen. Yay, that works! Only... it just changes the default apps and the language for the Smart Hub. Does not enable the PVR features.

Okay. Dig deeper. There is another locale setting. This one's at a deeper level in the system, but it seems you need a service remote to access it. Those are about $15 on eBay from China. Actually, if Samsung hadn't removed the IR blaster from my S7, I could just use an app. But, they did. However, I can build one instead of paying $15 and waiting 2-3 weeks for China shipping. I have some 940nm IR LEDs. The codes for the button presses are easy to find on the web. If I connect the IR LEDs to the headphone jack on my phone, and download the remote codes as WAV files, it should work.

I will try that today, and let you know how it goes.
 
GasBandit

GasBandit

Staff member
fade said:
Sooo.... I got this new TV (Samsung KS8000), and I got really excited, because it has built-in PVR features, including pausing and rewinding live TV. Real friggin' neato. The problem is that due to crappy legal stuff which probably involves companies like Tivo slipping checks to congress, these features are disabled on US and Canada models.

Disabled, it says, but not removed. The buttons are still there. If I click, they say "Not Available". I seriously doubt it's deeply disabled, so I did some research. Sure enough, all you need to do is change the TV's locale to reenable the features. Supposedly "carribean" is a good setting.

Problem is, docs are scarce. There's some Konami code you can put in during setup to bring up a locale menu that I find in some forum posts. For this TV, it's mute, volume up, channel up, mute during the Terms and Conditions screen. Yay, that works! Only... it just changes the default apps and the language for the Smart Hub. Does not enable the PVR features.

Okay. Dig deeper. There is another locale setting. This one's at a deeper level in the system, but it seems you need a service remote to access it. Those are about $15 on eBay from China. Actually, if Samsung hadn't removed the IR blaster from my S7, I could just use an app. But, they did. However, I can build one instead of paying $15 and waiting 2-3 weeks for China shipping. I have some 940nm IR LEDs. The codes for the button presses are easy to find on the web. If I connect the IR LEDs to the headphone jack on my phone, and download the remote codes as WAV files, it should work.

I will try that today, and let you know how it goes.
Click to expand...
I can't believe DVRs are still $200-600 and up. Normally I'd be chuckling about all the time and effort being put into something that has a straightforward solution, but at those prices? God fucking speed, good sir.
 
Gruebeard

Gruebeard

GasBandit said:
I can't believe DVRs are still $200-600 and up. Normally I'd be chuckling about all the time and effort being put into something that has a straightforward solution, but at those prices? God fucking speed, good sir.
Click to expand...
Yeah, and he's doing a bunch of extra work just to save 15 bucks!

Well, it's not work if it's a hobby.
 
fade

fade

Staff member
It worked!

I made my little homemade remote, and found some wav files with the right remote patterns. At first nothing happened, but I figured my phone wasn't playing the wav files "loudly" enough to flash the LEDs brightly enough. So I sent the wav files via Bluetooth to my receiver, and jacked up the volume. You can see I needed an adapter for the bigger headphone jack.

20170511_185651.jpg


That was when I discovered I had accidentally grabbed white LEDs. Oops. But, they worked anyway. The service menu opened! There are many options here, and lots of ways I'm sure of bricking the TV. So I cautiously navigated to the "local set" option and set it to the internet recommended value of "carribe" for carribean. TV completely erases at this point, so be prepared to reset everything.

20170511_185112.jpg

20170511_185223.jpg


Now it all works. I have a 500 GB external drive I have no other use for. It's old, but it passed the performance test the TV does. It was about half full of junk when I first tested, and even then it said I had 217 hours of record time remaining. So fully erased, it ought to be more than enough. Works just as well as a real DVR as far as I can see. The only thing I don't like is that this vintage 2007 HDD makes a lot of heat. Oh well. Can't win em all I guess.
 
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