A couple of weeks ago I caved in under my own internal pressure and ordered a 46” LED-backlit LCD TV, Samsung’s UE46D5005PW. I’ve yet to actually hook it up to cable, but after a little calibration I got pretty pictures coming out from XBMC on my laptop over HDMI.
Then today, I ended up poking around some more in the menus and discovered the license section pictured above. The TV is running Linux with BusyBox, GTK, SDL, ffmpeg and several other packages installed. How cool ain’t that? Apparently Samsung has been building Linux firmwares for several years now, I had no idea. It does however seems like Samsung started encrypting their firmwares about a year ago, which is both sad and irritating because it’d be so cool to be able to run software like ScummVM and get PVR functionality on it.
But then again, I wasn’t expecting the TV to be more than a TV to begin with. Plugged in a USB flash drive containing HD x264 video in an MKV container, and it was played back perfectly! This won’t be replacing XBMC any time soon, but it’s nice to see that TV set firmwares are improving and might eventually become useful. Also, I probably get geek bragging rights and super e-penis for owning a Linux TV.
