This post is part of a series of posts that I am currently writing about the bugs that I have found in my Philips TV since I bought it in January 2016
The first bug I encountered on my TV started showing up within months of my purchase. The behavior was that I was watching TV, and then the screen suddenly went black. I could go into the main menu and navigate around, but I couldn’t get any response from TV related features. I couldn’t change channel and did not get a picture.
After a couple of minutes this dialogue appeared. Translated it says “The process org.droidtv.settings has stopped”
After displaying this dialogue the TV shut down entirely and rebooted, showing me a nice Android logo and then it spent a couple of minutes booting again.
This appeared once in a while for no apparent reason. I had not done anything actively when the error occurred, but was just watching regular flow TV.
So if I was watching a good movie I should be aware that I might experience a 5-10 minute fall-out for no reason at all.
The solution
I approached the Philips support about this issue, and due to my naivety I just asked when there was an update to fix this because I thought this was just a simple issue and easy to fix. This decision I have regretted ever since… I should have returned the TV immediately at the first sign, that it showed issues with regular flow TV.
The answer from the support was 2 things
1. Disable HBB TV, so a smart TV feature should be disabled on this brand new TV making it more like a “dumb” TV
2. Disable automatic channel updates, presumably based on the assumption that when I saw this error it was because the TV was attempting to update the channels in the background, which obviously conflicted with me watching TV
I did both of these things, but the problem continued, and when I reached out to the support, they told me an update was on the way. This update seemed to fix this specific problem, but if you continue reading my blog you will see that this was just the beginning of a long an painful journey.