Tuesday 6 September 2011

Viera Connect comes to 2010 TV's!

Well, that was a surprise! Went to load up youtube on my TV today, and it forced a firmware update - ho hum. Let it finish, then discovered it'd updated from VieraCast to Viera Connect! So firstly I get the thing I really wanted (internet radio - Shoutcast app, it's really good), and secondly, there's the VieraConnect Market so you can link to additional applications!

Time for some more tinkering I think :D This TV just got a whole lot better!

Well done Panasonic :D

Sunday 15 May 2011

Viera Connect

So it seems the 2011 range of Panasonic TV's and Blue Ray players come with "Viera Connect", a new, improved but sadly incompatible upgrade to VieraCast! We are therefore now out in the cold with our "legacy" hardware.

All may not be lost, however. One assumes that the code will not be compatible with our units for chipset/hardware purposes (especially 3D games!), but if the code is delivered in a similar way to VieraCast, it may be possible to extract some useful information from them. i.e. we probably won't be able to run it natively, but we may for example be able to tap into sports channel streams (NBA etc?) by analyzing the new TV's via proxy as we have already done here.

It may also be that the code for the new TV's is similar if not exactly the same, and the publication of the development SDK (presumably not to the general public, but it may leak?) will give more of an insight into what we may be able to add to our sets.

If anyone has access to a 2011 unit with Viera Connect (I don't!), it'd be useful if you could have a play via a proxy - see if you can figure out where it downloads initial code from (instead of vieracast.eu etc), what the code looks like, etc. etc. Any comments appreciated.


Sorry I've not been around much recently - I am still here and the blog isn't totally dead, I've just been very busy and haven't had anything useful to add :D