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“Hacking” the hotel room TV

2023-09-14

Hello everyone

It’s been a while since my last post. Holiday time :). And it will be some hacking experience from that time. I was living in a hotel in sunny Portugal and after a long day of tripping, I decided to watch another episode of the “The Dropout” series. So I connected my Amazon Firestick to the TV, set up the network connection, and… what I saw was a really dark picture showing some soap opera effect. The “Soap Opera” effect as I call it happens when all these “true motion”, “clear motion” systems are turned on, so the standard 24fps becomes 60fps or more. It’s a matter of preference. Personally, I hate it and always switch it off to get the picture in the original form as it was created. So I pressed the settings button on the remote control but nothing happened. It seems something was locked and the TV was protected against tampering. It was pretty late and I decided to watch the episode as it is – dark, soap opera, and pretty quiet, cause I couldn’t also turn the volume up more than 30.

The next day I googled a bit and found out that there is something called “Hotel Mode” in this TV (it was some LG smart TV). So I found something that worked for me. Look at the remote controller first.

 

  1. I pressed the input selection button and selected the TV source (not my firestick HDMI)
  2. I pressed the settings button and held it for 5-10 seconds until the gray border appeared at the top and some info on the current channel.
  3. As soon as it appeared, I entered the 1,1,0,5 code  and pressed the OK button
  4. The menu appeared on the screen where I could turn the “Hotel Mode” off 😀

 

When I turned it off, I completely turned off energy saving, so the picture became normal and of course “true motion”,  so the soap opera effect disappeared. I also set picture mode to “Cinema”. Now I could enjoy my series :).

 

 

On the day I left the hotel room I set the settings back to the original ones and turned the “Hotel Mode” on again.  Turning the hotel mode on itself will not get back the previous settings automagically.

I hope this can be useful for someone.

See you next hack or bug :>

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