Extracting Samsung TV firmware on Linux

When using our Samsung UE32B6000 TV as Full HD laptop display via HDMI cable, the picture was not very good. Full HD via VGA cable is ok, and lower resolutions with HDMI are ok also. To get rid of the problem, I decided to upgrade the TV's firmware.

The Samsung website offered a .exe only that, when run on Windows or with Wine 1.3.30, extracts some files to a directory. You can extract the files without Wine or Windows!

file-roller, the Gnome archiving frontend, opens the .exe file and displays its contents! Internally, it uses the 7z cli tool - which means we can extract the files on the shell manually, without Wine or Windows:

$ 7z -o/media/usbstick x samsung-ue32b6000-update-T-CHL5CIPDEUC_2009.2__________PX.exe
7-Zip [64] 9.20  Copyright (c) 1999-2010 Igor Pavlov  2010-11-18
p7zip Version 9.20 (locale=de_DE.UTF-8,Utf16=on,HugeFiles=on,4 CPUs)

Processing archive: samsung-ue32b6000-update-T-CHL5CIPDEUC_2009.2__________PX.exe

Extracting  T-CHL5CIPDEUC/image/appdata.img.sec
Extracting  T-CHL5CIPDEUC/image/appdata.img.sec.vs     Unsupported Method
Extracting  T-CHL5CIPDEUC/image/exe.img.sec
Extracting  T-CHL5CIPDEUC/image/exe.img.sec.vs     Unsupported Method
Extracting  T-CHL5CIPDEUC/image/info.txt
Extracting  T-CHL5CIPDEUC/image/major_version
Extracting  T-CHL5CIPDEUC/image/minor_version
Extracting  T-CHL5CIPDEUC/image/serial_temp
Extracting  T-CHL5CIPDEUC/image/validinfo.txt
Extracting  T-CHL5CIPDEUC/image/version_info.txt
Extracting  T-CHL5CIPDEUC/image
Extracting  T-CHL5CIPDEUC

Sub items Errors: 2

Unfortunately, the contents of the 2 .vs files do not get extracted; the files are empty. Since I already upgraded the firmware before trying the 7z extraction, I cannot verify that it works without the .vs files. My TV tells me that there are no updates - with and without the correct .vs files.

Please let me know if it works without or with empty .vs files.

Written by Christian Weiske.

Comments? Please send an e-mail.