A web browser you can sideload onto a Samsung TV — the one the TV should have shipped with.
Overscan is the picture area a TV pushes past the visible edge, which is roughly what this does to the web on a television.
The built-in Samsung browser tells websites it's a TV, so sites hand it a stripped down "smart TV" page instead of the real one. Overscan wraps the TV's own web engine in an app that behaves like a desktop browser:
- Sites load their normal desktop version, because the browser identifies itself as desktop Chrome.
- JavaScript stays on, so pages aren't broken or half-rendered.
- The remote works like a mouse — the D-pad moves a pointer, OK clicks.
- Favourites and history, on a start screen built for a TV.
- You can type with an on-screen keyboard driven by the D-pad, into the address bar and into search boxes on the page. QWERTY, AZERTY, QWERTZ or alphabetical, whichever you're quickest on.
Requested in tizen-community-packages#24.
| Your TV | Download | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| 2018 (Tizen 4.0) | Overscan-tizen4.tpk |
The oldest TVs that can run this. Chromium 56, so expect real limits. Untested. |
| 2019–2020 (Tizen 5.0–5.5) | Overscan-tizen5.tpk |
Needs a partner certificate to sign — see below. Old engine, so expect some sites to misbehave. |
| 2021–2024 (Tizen 6.0–8.0) | Overscan-tizen8.tpk |
Not yet tested on hardware. |
| 2025+ (Tizen 9.0–10.0) | Overscan-nui.tpk |
Tested on the Tizen 10 emulator. Modern engine — sites generally just work. |
2017 and older sets (Tizen 3.0, 2.x) cannot run Overscan. Samsung only added .NET to TVs with the 2018 range, so there is no runtime for the app to start in — this is a platform limit, not something a build can work around.
Grab the packages from the latest release.
Not sure which platform your set is? sdb capability prints platform_version.
Sideloading a TV app means signing the package with your own certificate and pushing it over the network. If you've done this before, nothing here is unusual; if you haven't, Apps2Samsung does the signing and installing for you.
- Put the TV in Developer Mode and note its IP address.
- Sign the
.tpkwith your certificate. The packages in releases are default-signed, which no TV accepts. - Install it, and launch Overscan from the TV's Apps list.
On a 2019/2020 set the package must be signed with a partner-level certificate. That isn't a preference — the TV's web engine is bolted to its DRM stack, and without a partner certificate the app is not allowed to load it, so the browser simply won't start. Newer sets don't have this restriction.
| Key | What it does |
|---|---|
| D-pad | Move the pointer (speeds up while held) |
| OK | Click. On a text box, opens the keyboard for it |
| Back | Close overlay → back a page → exit |
| CH ▲ / ▼ | Page up / page down |
| 0 | Address bar |
| 1 | Switch how the browser identifies itself, and reload |
| 2 | Pointer style |
| 3 | Diagnostics (what the page thinks it's talking to) |
| 4 | Give the keys to the page, for its own navigation |
| 5 | Type into the text box you last clicked |
| 6 | Page-fit correction (for stretched rendering) |
| 7 | Show/hide the key hints |
| 8 | Keep this page in favourites (press again to remove) |
| 9 | Back to the start screen |
| Info | Images on/off — the biggest speed-up on an old set |
The last key on the keyboard's bottom row switches its layout — QWERTY (the default), then AZERTY, QWERTZ and the alphabetical grid. It shows the layout you're on, and the choice is remembered.
No — and on a slow TV it can be slower. Overscan uses the TV's own web engine, so the rendering speed is exactly the same; what changes is which version of a site you get, and the desktop version is usually the heaviest one. If YouTube takes two minutes in the built-in browser, the desktop YouTube will not be quicker.
What does help on an older set:
- Press
Infoto turn images off. The engine can't be made faster, but it can be given far less to do, and this is the biggest single win. - Press
1to pick the mobile version of a site. Mobile pages are much lighter than desktop ones and often render better on an old engine. - Use a site's TV interface where one exists —
youtube.com/tvis built for exactly this hardware and is dramatically faster than the desktop site.
- The engine is the TV's, not ours. An app can't ship its own Chromium, so on a 2019 set you're browsing with a 2017 engine (Chromium 63) no matter what. Overscan fixes how the TV identifies itself; it can't make an old engine understand a modern site. On a 2025 set the engine is Chromium 130 and this caveat mostly disappears.
- Rendering is stretched on Tizen 5.0 — the engine lays pages out at one size
and paints them at another. Key
6toggles a correction; this is an open bug. - No downloads or file uploads yet.
- The TV's own on-screen keyboard can still flash up briefly on sites that focus their search box as soon as they load.
./build.sh # all packages -> dist/
./build.sh tizen5 # just the 2019/2020 oneYou'll need the .NET 6 SDK with the tizen workload, plus the .NET Core 3.1 SDK
for the older package. CI builds all four on every push — see
.github/workflows/build.yml.
Overscan is a .NET app that hosts the TV's own web engine and adds the things a TV browser needs: a pointer driven from the remote, an on-screen keyboard, and a user-agent override. The pointer and typing are implemented as JavaScript injected into each page, because the TV's engine gives an app no way to synthesise mouse input.
Because the web-view API changed twice across TV generations, there are three builds from one shared source tree rather than one universal package.
The full story — API archaeology, the DRM permission wall, the diagnostics built
for TVs that can't be logged, emulator setup — is in
docs/INTERNALS.md.
MIT — see LICENSE.