2018-12-18

Is my LG TV haunted?

A few days ago my TV announced it had new s/w to download, so I let it do its thing and upgrade.

Maybe that was a mistake. Yesterday I came in to my man-cave and the TV was on, no signal. That is odd for two reasons: (a) I turned it off the night before, and (b) it turns off after a while with no signal (or used to).

I assumed I was being silly. But this morning the same, and I was suspicious.

Later during the day I popped out today for a coffee, and I definitely turned the TV off when leaving. My wife saw me do it - I am not going crazy. When I came back, there it is, on, no signal.

So I did a test - I turned off the TV.

It turns itself back on!

It also turns on the (connected) Apple TV (as I would expect), and after a while the Apple TV goes off leaving the TV on with no signal. It stays on!

I can only assume this is LG's latest "burn up your OLED pixels quickly" software update. I can't think of any other reason they would do this. Very annoying. Not quite sure what to do - the power socket is an option, but annoyingly all hidden behind the cabinet, and rather tedious to say the least.

FYI I went in to menus and it has "turn on by WiFi" and "turn on by bluetooth", both of which I have disabled, but no different.




P.S. Disabling the simlink stuff "fixes" it, but why was it suddenly broken. It was fine before. Arrrg!

11 comments:

  1. Mine is doing exactly the same thing (OLED55B7V). I unplug the HDMI cable overnight now so I don't come down in the morning to find everything has been powered up all night.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Mine sometimes does something similar. After watching a DVD or bluray and turning the system off sometimes the bluray will send a wake signal to the TV a short time later. It only happens when there is a spinning disc in the tray, though.

    My guess is that my bluray isn't actually turning off immediately when it gets the HDMI-CEC signal to, but the TV is. Then, as the bluray shuts down it returns to the menu from the play mode and spins down the disc. It's at this point that the TV turns on. I've got an AV-receiver in the middle, so I know the CEC signals are being sent, as I see that respond too.

    Do you have HDMI-CEC enabled? LG calls it Simplink. If so, maybe you could try using a camera that supports slow motion to see if you can tell which device turns on first?

    ReplyDelete
  3. My nVidia Shield occasionally turns the TV back on for no apparent reason. I disabled HDMI-CEC on the TV, which fixed it, at the cost of having to (shock) actually turn the TV on myself when I want to use it.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Honestly, having seen what happened with my parents' LG PVR, I will never buy anything from LG again requiring any software more complex than 'Hello world'. They are unbelievably dire at firmware work: as far as I can see, it is always a bad idea to accept any firmware upgrades for any of their products because they always make things worse, often much worse.

    (In my parents' case, one update they were asked to install by LG support changed their PVR from intermittently not recording anything at all when you ask it to, to having some sort of fencepost bug that led to it always recording on a channel one lower than the one it was meant to record -- with the timings for the programme that was on the channel it wasn't recording. That was, of course, the last ever firmware update, leaving the product in a basically useless state forever. Of course since it also had an undocumented 255-recording max limit, and couldn't record and watch at the same time even though it had two tuners, it wasn't much use even without those bugs. This was a £400 product and it wasn't worth £40, entirely because of the software.)

    They tried to sell me one of their smart TVs last year (via door-to-door sales, wtf). I told them "not if you paid me".

    ReplyDelete
  5. Solder the NAND chip in the TV to try and downgrade :)

    ReplyDelete
  6. 𓂺 (Cockburn - pronounced "Coburn")Thursday 20 December 2018 at 14:54:00 GMT

    I love these videos, they are so well produced. Really good quality audio and always in focus. Plus the content is great.

    The bit at 58 seconds made me chuckle, so relateable! He he

    ReplyDelete
  7. What is AAISP planning for 2019 and beyond ?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I may do a post on that - main thing is the FireBrick FB9000 dev, and hence 10G LNSs - bigger and better internet services as always.

      Delete
  8. There was another software update from LG for my TV today so fingers crossed it's fixed.

    (btw. not many TV manufacturers even update their software.. my panasonic in the bedroom hasn't had an update since release, so props to LG for contined support, even if they don't always get it right).

    ReplyDelete

Comments are moderated purely to filter out obvious spam, but it means they may not show immediately.

Hot tubbing...

I have a hot tub, it came with the house over 3 years ago. Managing a hot tub is complicated, and expensive. The expensive part is the power...