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Enabling PVR features on TV: The Saga Begins

May 10, 2017#1

fade

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.

May 10, 2017#2

GasBandit

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.

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.

May 10, 2017#3

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.

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.

May 10, 2017#4

Dei

Gruebeard said:
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.

Also to save the weeks it would take to get from China.

May 10, 2017#5

Gruebeard

Dei said:
Also to save the weeks it would take to get from China.

Yeah, but if he's a procrastinator, shipping from China would be quicker

May 10, 2017#6

fade

Plus it's fun to solve the puzzle.

May 11, 2017#7

fade

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.

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.

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.

May 11, 2017#8

drifter

I can't even get my Chromecast to work right.

May 14, 2017#9

PatrThom

fade said:
this vintage 2007 HDD makes a lot of heat. Oh well. Can't win em all I guess.

I'm sure you can probably whip up an actively cooled enclosure of some sort for it, with parts you have hanging around the house.

--Patrick

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