Hacking a new home screen for my Samsung TV

I saw a variety of social media posts about people being able to use AI to “hack” their televisions into having a smarter home screen, and I finally sat down and did it myself! I am SUPER happy with the results. In this post, I’ll talk through how I made a new home screen launcher for my TV, and reprogrammed the remote to use it. About my TV I have a 2021 Samsung TV (not a Frame, it’s one of their QLED TVs that they used to sell at Costco), and it took some effort to get here, even with all the AI tools I had to throw at it. The “Smart Hub” thing that they have on these TVs is… hot garbage. My biggest complaint about my TV is how slow it is to get running, how it feels bloated with weird caching, and if someone sits on a remote and turns off the TV (which is more common than you’d hope in a house with toddlers), it takes sometimes a full couple of minutes to get to a normal state again. They stopped updating the firmware on my TV in 2023, so a bunch of the tutorials on how to do some…

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