A Plex client for Samsung TVs that doesn't suck.
Smooth scrolling, hardware playback, zero dependencies.

The official Plex app on Samsung TVs is painfully slow. The same library flies on a Fire TV or an Apple TV, so the TV isn't the problem; the app is.

On my 75" Samsung Q60B (2022, Tizen 6.5):

The Plex server answers a search in 30–150 ms, so the server was never the bottleneck.

SamSUCKS is a from-scratch Plex client for Samsung's Tizen TVs, built for speed:

• Smooth. About 50 fps while scrolling, with a 17 ms median frame, measured on a 2022 Samsung Q60B.
• Hardware playback. It plays files directly through Samsung's video decoder. On a real 3,952-item library, 98.7% plays without any transcoding.
• Quick to start. Home appears in under a second, and video starts about a second after you press play.
• Tiny. Plain JavaScript, no framework, no npm, no build step.

You need:

• a Samsung smart TV (tested on a 2022 Q60B; 2020 or newer should work),
• a Mac or Linux computer on the same network as the TV,
• a Plex Media Server.

1. Download SamSUCKS

git clone https://github.com/rfaile313/samsucks.git
cd samsucks

2. Run setup

./scripts/setup.sh

This installs Samsung's command-line tools (about 270 MB), finds your TV on the network, and creates a signing certificate. If Developer Mode isn't turned on yet, it stops and tells you exactly what to do, including your computer's IP address. The steps are also below. Run it again afterwards, and it picks up where it left off.

3. Install it on the TV

./scripts/deploy.sh

SamSUCKS opens on the TV. Go to plex.tv/link on your phone or computer and type the code it shows, or scan the QR code. That's it.

Press Home → Apps and scroll to the bottom, where your installed apps are. To pin it to the home bar, highlight SamSUCKS, open its options (hold OK) and choose Add to Home.

What's in it: home rows (Continue Watching, On Deck, Recently Added…), full library grids, search with the TV keyboard, movie and show pages with seasons and episodes, resume and mark watched, audio and subtitle picker (including external .srt files), up-next autoplay, and watch progress synced back to Plex.

Samsung TVs only run web apps, but there's nothing slow about the web engine if you treat it like a game engine:

• Every animation is a GPU transform or fade. Nothing big is ever repainted.
• Lists reuse a fixed set of tiles instead of creating new ones as you scroll.
• The focus ring never moves. The content slides under it.
• A held-down key can never queue up work: input is applied at most once per frame.
• Plex resizes every image to exactly the pixels on screen before it's sent.
• Video goes straight to Samsung's hardware decoder. Only what the TV can't decode (mostly DTS audio) is converted by Plex, and the video itself is never re-encoded.

The biggest win was one line of CSS:

A full-screen CSS gradient behind the UI took almost two seconds to repaint on the TV's CPU. Now the background is a 2×2-pixel WebGL texture that the GPU stretches to fill the screen: it looks the same and costs nothing. Want to see the difference? Settings → Demo: original slow renderer brings the old one back, and Settings → Performance overlay shows the frame rate.

node tools/devserver.mjs          # receives logs and perf samples from the TV (build/tv.log)
./scripts/deploy.sh --dev         # dev build: performance overlay, logging, remote control

curl 'localhost:8790/send?keys=down,right,right,enter'       # press buttons
tools/tveval.sh 'document.title'                              # run JS on the TV, print the result
tools/tveval.sh '__bench(["right","right","left","left"], 250)'   # frame stats while replaying keys
tools/tveval.sh "__css('.hero-art{display:none}')"           # A/B test a CSS change live

app/            the whole TV app; deploy.sh copies it to build/app and packages it
  js/screens/   home, library, detail, player, search, settings, login
  js/ui/        rows, grids, tiles, image loader, backdrop, perf overlay
  js/plex/      plex.tv sign-in and Plex Media Server API
  js/platform/  Tizen keys and device info, AVPlay / <video> player
scripts/        setup.sh (one-time) and deploy.sh (build + install)
tools/          dev server, TV eval, network remote

Inspired by plx-native, a native Plex client for LG TVs. Fonts: Inter and Barlow Condensed (SIL Open Font License). QR codes: qrcode-generator by Kazuhiko Arase (MIT).

SamSUCKS is an independent project, not affiliated with Plex or Samsung.

Copyright © 2026 rfaile313. SamSUCKS is free software, released under the GNU General Public License v3.0: you can use, study, change and share it, and anything you distribute that's built on it must stay open source under the same license.