Glass Home

A minimal, Apple TV-style home screen for Samsung Tizen TVs, plus a small password-protected website, served by the TV itself, for adding photos and shortcuts from your phone.

• Full-screen photos that crossfade every 45 seconds with a slow drift: 12 bundled CC0 nature photos mixed with your own, shuffled once a day.
• A frosted-glass dock of your apps, then your website and YouTube shortcuts, then +.
• Clock and date, and optionally the weather (now plus 7 days, from Open-Meteo, no account or key).
• A screensaver (only the photos after 3 minutes idle; the first button press just wakes the screen) and dimmed photos in the evening.
• + shows the address and password of the TV's photo website. Open it on your phone to upload photos (resized on the phone, so iPhone HEIC works) and add YouTube or website shortcuts.
• Plain HTML, CSS and JavaScript. No frameworks, no tracking, no ads.

Photos of it on the tested TV, and of the Samsung settings from the guide, are in docs/screenshots/on-tv.

Read this first

• It does not replace Samsung's Home screen. No app can on its own: the Home button still opens Smart Hub. What works: pin Glass Home first on the Home row, turn Start with Smart Hub Home off and Autorun Last App on, and the TV starts in Glass Home. (Autorun Last App reopens the last app, so turn the TV off from Glass Home if you want to come back to it.) Two other projects, CleanFrame and Arn0, do change what Home opens, by rewriting undocumented TV settings from Developer Mode. Each was tested on one TV, and a firmware update can undo or break it.
• You install it yourself in the TV's Developer Mode, signed with a free Samsung developer certificate made for your TV. That needs a computer, about an hour the first time, and a free Samsung account. There is no ready-made download: a signed package only installs on the TV it was made for.
• Reported working on Samsung TVs from 2018 to 2025 (Tizen 4 to 10): see Tested TVs. Reports welcome. On 2018 TVs (Tizen 4) set photoService: false and smartHubLaunch: true (see Settings).
• A big OS upgrade can delete it. Samsung's Tizen OS upgrades (for example to Tizen 9 / One UI Tizen) have removed sideloaded apps on other TVs. You can reinstall it the same way.
• The photo website is plain HTTP on your home network. It only answers devices on your local network and needs the password, but anyone on the same Wi-Fi who intercepts traffic could see the password and photos in transit.

Install

Step by step: docs/INSTALL.md. In short:

1. Turn on Developer Mode on the TV.
2. Install Samsung's Tizen SDK command-line tools on your computer.
3. Make a free Samsung certificate for your TV (one browser sign-in).
4. Set your options in app/js/config.js.
5. scripts/build.sh, then scripts/install.sh.
6. Pin it on the Home row, set it to open at power-on, and turn Developer Mode off again.

Settings

All in app/js/config.js:

Setting	What it does
apps	The dock apps, in order. Each is found by its Tizen app ID, then by name. Remove what you don't have. icon: false shows a plain name tile.
inputs	HDMI ports as dock tiles, after the apps: { hdmi: 4, label: 'Games console' }, optionally with an icon path under app/. { tv: true, label: 'Live TV' } is the antenna (the TV's tuner). Empty by default.
weather	Off until you set enabled: true, latitude and longitude (place is the label shown under the forecast; temperatureUnit: 'fahrenheit' for °F).
locale	Date and time format, e.g. 'en-GB'; empty uses the TV's.
ambient	Screensaver delay.
night	Evening dimming hours (24-hour, TV clock).
youtubeMode	How YouTube shortcuts are opened (see below).
photoIntervalMs	How often the photo changes.
photoService	false turns off the photo website, and with it +, shortcuts and your own photos. For TVs that can't run it (2018 models); also remove <tizen:service> and the web.service feature from app/config.xml.
smartHubLaunch	true on older TVs where apps won't start from the dock: opens them through Samsung's own launcher and hides the photos while they start. Off by default.

Your own logo: scripts/use-logo.sh path/to/logo.png (square, ideally 1024 x 1024) makes the TV icon and the website icons. The on-screen name is in app/index.html (brand-name) and app/config.xml (<name>).

Using it

Remote	What happens
Left / Right	move along the dock
OK	open the app, website or video, or switch to the HDMI input
Hold OK	Move left, Move right, Remove (shortcuts) or Hide (apps and inputs), Cancel
Back	closes the menu or the panel; does nothing on the home screen
OK on +	the website address and password; New password; show hidden apps

Photos and shortcuts. On a phone on the same Wi-Fi, open the address shown under + and sign in with the password shown there. Upload photos (up to 300, 500 MB in total; portrait photos are fitted on blurred edges or cropped), and add websites or YouTube links (videos, playlists, Shorts, links with a start time). New photos appear next on the TV. The phone stays signed in for 30 days.

YouTube shortcuts open the YouTube app at the video. On the tested TV the plain watch?v= link worked from a cold start and while YouTube was running; Samsung's documented PAYLOAD deep link lost the video at YouTube's "Who's watching?" screen. The switch at the bottom of the + panel cycles through watch URL, the PAYLOAD form, and both, if yours behaves differently.

Websites open in Samsung's own browser (the code follows Samsung's documented method, but this wasn't tested on a TV yet).

HDMI inputs (the inputs setting) switch the TV with tizen.tvwindow.setSource, then open Samsung's TV viewer (org.tizen.tv-viewer) so the input fills the screen. This needs the public tv.window privilege. Tested on a 2022 S95B (Tizen 6.5) with HDMI 4.

Live TV ({ tv: true } in inputs) does the same with the TV's tuner source. If the TV reports no tuner source, only the TV viewer is opened. Tested on a 2022 S95B (Tizen 6.5), which reports the tuner as TV number 1.

Tested TVs

Reported by people running it. Thank you! To add yours, fill in a TV report.

TV	Year	Tizen	Notes	Report
Samsung S85F	2025	10		#8
Samsung Q70C	2023	8	the TV it was built on
Samsung S95B	2022	6.5	HDMI and Live TV tiles tested here	#10, #12
Samsung Q80A	2021	6.0		#9
Samsung QN90A	2021	6.0	needed the CSS fixes from #5, now included	#4
Samsung TU8000	2020	5.5	photo service included	#3
Samsung NU6900	2018	4.0	with photoService: false and smartHubLaunch: true	#2

A 2017 MU7000 (Tizen 3.0) also runs it with two changes that aren't in this repository yet (#6).

How it works

 TV (one Tizen web app package)
 ┌──────────────────────────────┐   http://127.0.0.1:8090/local/*    ┌────────────────────────────┐
 │ Glass Home                   │ ─────────────────────────────────▶ │ Photos service             │
 │ index.html, js/, css/        │   loopback + this install's key    │ app/service/*.js (Node)    │
 │ dock, photos, clock, + panel │ ◀──── photos, shortcuts, password  │ port 8090 on the home LAN  │
 └──────────────────────────────┘                                    └─────────────▲──────────────┘
         starts the service at launch                                             │ http://<TV IP>:8090
                                                                     phone on the home Wi-Fi, signed in

• The app is what you see. It asks the service for your photos and shortcuts and keeps the last answer, so it still works if the service is down.
• The service is a Tizen web service inside the same package (Node.js; the tested TV runs Node 16, the code sticks to the Node 12 API). It serves the phone website and keeps everything in the app's private data folder, which survives restarts and updates and is deleted with the app. (Only if that folder isn't writable does it fall back to /home/owner/share/GlassHome1, which is kept after uninstalling; the + panel shows which is in use.)
• With the free (public-level) certificate the service can't start itself at boot; the app starts it whenever it opens.

Security. The password is three random words and two digits, stored as a PBKDF2-SHA256 hash. Five wrong tries lock a device out for 5 minutes, and a device guessing passwords can't block others from signing in. The site only answers private-network and loopback addresses, refuses other host names (DNS rebinding), and has CSRF protection and a strict content security policy. Uploads are checked as real JPEGs with size caps. The app and its service share a random key generated per install (never committed). So the TV can show the password after a restart, the service keeps it in a private file next to its hash.

Network use. The app contacts nothing except the service itself; Open-Meteo if weather is on; each website you add, once, for its own icon (no third-party favicon services, never addresses on your home network); and YouTube for shortcut titles and thumbnails.

Develop

Needs Node 22 (what it was developed and tested with) and a Chromium-based browser (Chrome, Brave, Chromium or Edge; set BROWSER to choose). The servers listen only on 127.0.0.1; the demo shortcuts and the tests fetch site icons and YouTube details from the internet (node dev/run.js --no-fetch avoids that, but some tests then fail).

node dev/run.js --demo     # service :18090, TV app :18091, throwaway data
                           # TV app:  http://127.0.0.1:18091/index.html?preview=1
                           # website: http://127.0.0.1:18090/ (password printed)
dev/test-api.sh            # website + service API (curl)
node dev/ui-test.js        # TV app and phone website in a headless browser
node dev/test-netutil.js   # address rules (IPv4/IPv6, LAN, loopback, hosts)
node dev/test-parsers.js   # hostile-page parsing stays fast
node dev/test-limiter.js   # sign-in throttle and fair queue
node dev/test-data.js      # TV app's service client
node dev/test-ytparse.js   # YouTube link parser
node dev/test-backdrop.js  # photo rotation
node dev/lint-node12.js    # service code stays within the Node 12 API

GitHub runs all of these on every pull request and push to main (macOS, Node 22): .github/workflows/test.yml.

Preview options: ?preview=1, ?api=…, ?focus=N, ?bg=nature-05.jpg, ?panel=1, ?menu=1, ?still=1, ?wx=mock (sample weather), ?idle=MS (screensaver delay), ?night=1, ?inputs=1 (two sample HDMI tiles), ?photoService=0.

The dev tools and image scripts use macOS's sips; the app itself has no platform dependency.

Also in here

• docs/SAMSUNG-SETTINGS.md: turning off Samsung's content recognition, ad ID, promotions and autoplay, a DNS ad filter that kept every app working, and how to undo each.
• tools/: a standard-library Python remote for the TV's local control API (tvremote.py), a page that turns an iPhone on the same Wi-Fi into a camera pointed at the TV (phonecam.py; Samsung TVs can't take screenshots), and Wake-on-LAN (wake.py).

How this was made

Built in an evening with Claude Code, which did the research, drove the TV over Wi-Fi, checked every step through the iPhone camera, and wrote and tested the app. It also watched one cat video. Proof.

Licence

MIT. Photo and data credits: CREDITS.md. Not affiliated with Samsung, Apple or any app shown.