Information

The requirements, known supported models or potential models, and about the guide.

About

Hey there, this guide will guide you through getting your Sony TV working with "pro mode". For people who don't know, pro mode is a mode on Sony professional displays that allows you to do things like have a remote web UI, which is like iDRAC for Dell servers, set the allowed apps to be able to be used, lock the display in pro mode and require a password to go back to the normal mode, and many more options which are targeted towards corporate users. Now Pro mode used to be able to be used on their consumer TVs but Sony decided to make it more difficult to get it to try and make people purchase their Pro lineups instead which cost more.

Now the reason I made this guide in the first place. I was messing around on the TV and saw in the "All apps" section in settings that there was a system app called "Pro Mode" but it wasn't able to be opened. So I searched it up and it turns out you can't get it because of what I said above. I enabled adb on the TV to try and open it via the shell with intents but that didn't work, so I side-loaded an app called "App Manager" to see if that could open it in case I didn't type the right intent when trying in the adb shell since it can also do that and it can automatically find the app's intents and that didn't work either. So then comes where I got it working, which was when I was looking at Sony's documentation videos for the pro devices and on one of them they showed their home screen which had an app on there called "Pro Tools" which my TV model did not have but it had all the other items for pro mode. Then I thought "Well what if I extract the firmware from the pro models and get the ProTool apk"? When I was in the adb shell for my TV, I was also looking through the filesystem and came across a directory that had all the apk's that Sony pre-installs on the TV such as the TV app and the notifications app. I didn't know if it would work since, by default on the pro models, the Pro Tools app is installed as a system app and when you side-load apps with adb it installs it as a user app, but I went ahead and tried it and it worked! When I launched it, it asked for some permissions and worked just fine, so installing it as a user app worked anyway.

I was also looking around for information from people to see if they got it working on their TV at all and so far when writing this, no one has made a guide on this. I saw many people asking how to get Pro mode as well and everyone responded that they couldn't get it anymore because Sony removed it multiple updates ago and you couldn't get it on Android TV 10. Well, this guide shows you how you can and it works pretty well. In my opinion, if you have the apps/services installed on your TV, you should be able to use 100% of the device you paid for, not 90% or less. I wanted to make a detailed guide on how to make this work in case other people had the same question or wanted to use "Pro Mode" for themselves.

Requirements

So in order to do this, you'll need to following:

So what I meant by a "supported model" is that so far, as far as I can tell, is that the XR TV models would work the best for this. I created this guide using a XR-65A80K TV and it worked just fine but I don't have multiple TV's from the same series so I can't test them for myself to verify anymore than that. But the firmware my TV uses, it is also used on multiple TV's from the same series so it should have all the same stuff my TV started out with and should work the same way mine did. Now the BRAVIA 8 series is a little odd and the same goes for the K series. Basically they have different firmware and when I was looking through them, they don't have the "ProSettings" apk at all and unless you have root access you won't be able to get it working. Now here's the thing you can try it still and maybe it will work since I did go through the firmware with a hex editor and it still mentions "ProSettings", "hotelmode"/"ProMode" quite a lot and the  "ProMode" apk is on there and seems to be installed and the file size is larger than the one I used so it could be bundled in now with the "ProMode" apk instead as separate apk's. The BRAVIA 8 series and K series also have a different filesystem layout than the XR series so if you're going to try it out yourself make sure you look at the "Extras" if you need any help finding what zip file you need to extract.

Now if you're using a Linux distro, you can extract the firmware on your host but the way the firmware is set up and where our apk that we're looking for is, I couldn't get anything to open it correctly or extract it correctly after that point, so I had to use a Windows VM the rest of the way. If you want to try for yourself then just so you know what I tried was binwalk, using peazip, ark, dd for a specific offset, and even trying to mount it as a loop back device and they all either returned errors, crashed, or made over 300GB of blank data. To help you out, you should know that the system.img file is what we're after and in the system.img file there's another system.img file and two other .img files, so the first system.img file is like .tar file or a container for the other 3. The three duplicate files in it are the actual .img files and the ones outside the system.img file are full of 0's and are like placeholders.

Supported Models

These are the known supported models that use the same firmware or have the requirements already installed on them. Just know it could be more since these are the only ones I checked, and I think more of the XR series could be functional so far.