[Philips, Sony, TCL Android TV] tom_selleck:
Hi everyone

thanks to this forum I found out about the blessed new "unofficial" firmware for QV151E (38.41), so I just wanted to share my experience with it and give a couple tips I found useful.

First off: I have a Philips 49PUS7170, bought a couple of weeks ago. I had read about the software problems before buying, but I thought it was not a big deal overall. After experimenting with it for a week or so it appeared that I had underestimated the impact of the issues. Mainly, the impossibility to sideload non-androidTV apps was a huge issue which I had not detected while researching for TVs (foolishly I thought "hey, this is Android, I can tweak it as I like! Then I started reading Philips support forum with smug Philips developper guys saying this like "you really think we will allow you to install apps on a 2500K TV? this is not a cheap phone! Will never happen! NEVER!).

Anyways, after reading tons of unhappy emails from people desperately looking for a way out, I found this thread. First 50 pages didn't look too promissing, and just as I was getting ready to return it and get a Sony, I found out about the new firmware (38.41). Happiness! I went ahead and downloaded, unpacked the .upg file (800Mo approx) onto a USB stick, and insert it into the TV.

First thing of note: when you stick it into a USB port of the TV, install just automatically starts. I didn't even have a warning message or a "do you want to update?" message. So, if you choose to do it, be sure that you really want it. The update process went smoothly, lasted about 5mn and image was back after a couple of automatic reboots (sometimes with the TV completely off for a minute or so, so be patient and touch nothing).

The big changes for me so far are twofold:

- one: mouse pointer! mouse works in every context except for the main menu (ie, you can't click on an app to open it for some reason). Other than that it works everywhere else, which is great. The "internet" browser app suddenly becomes usable (haven't tried to install dolphin + flash yet but I hear it works fine).

- two: easy sideload! Finally Android TV works like Android Phone. Why they had blocked it before is beyond me. To sideload, I simply downloaded ES Explorer, linked it to my dropbox account, then on my phone downloaded APK Extractor, used it to turn my apps into apks, saved them to Dropbox on my phone, then clicked on the apks on the TV and voila! installed easily. The other thing needed to use sideloaded apps is Sideload Launcher, which can be found on Google Play on the TV.

Non Android Apps work great but two things you need to know:

1/ some will launch in portrait mode only. As you will notice, there is no option built in Android TV to force landscape mode, so you need to sideload an app called "Ultimate Rotation" which basically allows you to lock the app into landscape mode.

2/ you need a mouse to use most apps, as the TV remote will not let you do much on non-TV-optimised apps. I use a Logitech DiNovo Mini and it works great though.

Last thing to know: after the initial firmware install, I noticed a couple of app crashes, particularly Google Cast Receiver (a system app). So I strongly advise to do a full TV reinstall after you load the firmware. After that the system runs fine and no more crashes! Well, actually, this is not completely true, as I still experienced (once) a loss of sound over HDMI while viewing a video, which resulted in Android crashing. But to tell the truth I had done so much to the system when it occured that I probably had overloaded it, so it is probably (at least partly) my fault.

So, to conclude: this firmware update finally fixes most of the big annoyances with the system (generally running smoother, with less to no crashes, and with added features sorely missing before). As far as I am concerned now, the TV performs fine and does what you would expect. If only they would add VP9 software decoding to their Youtube app I would be pretty much set, but I am not holding my breath (between licensing issues, and possibly technical difficulties, we'll probably never get it).

Cheers!

---------- Post added at 09:51 AM ---------- Previous post was at 09:46 AM ----------

quick followup to the above post: the firmware I am talking about is 5.38.41, downloaded from this forum (around page 70). NOT the new 5.38.52 mentioned on page 85.

Which leads to this question: does 5.38.52 include the mouse pointer & app sideloading features? It does not appear in the changelog, which scares me a little (knowing Philips & all).