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Requirements

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

  • A computer running either Windows, Mac OS, or if you run Linux like me, I had to get a Windows VM for this.
  • 30 - 45 minutes at minimum but can vary for different people.
  • A supported model, more below.
  • You can find a supported model on the next page.

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.

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