Recently, we’ve bought a shiny new Samsung LED TV. It’s a Series 6 model with a large screen and an integrated DVB-C decoder. The TV set is pretty fine, it runs a Linux-based firmware and has an integrated media player.
After reading the tech specs, I’ve found out about the differences of Series 6 and Series 7 models and started worrying. The hardware is almost the same: Series 7 models have a CI+ interface and an additional USB port but this is not important for me. Both TV sets run the same firmware, but on Series 6 models, the integrated media player does not play movies. Hence the hardware is nearly the same, this limitation has no technical reasons.
So, I’ve investigated further… A friend suggested that we could patch the firmware and enable the movie playback there. I’ve contacted Samsung and requested a copy of the GPL-licensed source code. Though, their customer support never responded to my request. After this, I started to tinker with the firmware binary files, but I had to find that they are encrypted and digitally signed (using OpenSSL, lol).
This means, even if you get Samsung to hand over the source code, they won’t allow you to use it in the sense of correcting bugs on your own television. Bad karma; this is clearly not the will of the original software authors.
In spite of everything, there’s yet a simple solution – at least for the media player issue. The firmware holds a hidden service menu that can be entered by pressing INFO-MENU-MUTE-POWER when the TV is in standby. From there, I was able to change the model number to a Series 7 model and reach the fully-featured media player (see here).
