I’ve always treated my TVs simply as monitors with some additional functionality, like a built-in tuner or a simple media player. I never treated them as real computers.
Even when my family bought our first smart TV back in 2014, I still treated it as a monitor, even though I did know that it had a real Unix-like OS under the hood.
That has changed when I got (well, inherited) my own Smart TV, an 2016 model LG 43UH603V-ZE running WebOS 3.3.1. I previously had an old LG feature TV and used a separate device (a Raspberry Pi 3 with Kodi) to play all my media.
But since I now had a smart TV, I wanted to play everything directly on it, without using a separate device. My main sources of media are IPTV and my home server (which also acts as a NAS). IPTV viewing wasn’t a problem as WebOS had several apps for that. Connecting my server to the TV was a different story. It turned out that WebOS does not have any kind of support for NAS devices at all. No Samba, no FTP and no way of streaming HTTP links. Nothing.
At first, I tried to resort to using Emby media server via TVs built-in browser (tried Emby’s app as well), but it was too cumbersome to use with a remote. Not to mention the flaws, like really long loading times, buggy resuming and totally unnecessary transcoding of media that my TV could play directly. For example, I could not play a 4K H265 BDRip without Emby trying to transcode it to H264 resulting in choppy video and overloaded server.
This got me thinking: is there any way to mod the TV to retrofit Samba support in a way which would play nice with WebOS ?
And I did find a way. Now on to part 2.
P.S.: Happy 2018, the year of the Yellow Dog ! (sadly the Linux distro with the same name died long ago…)