@Mark Ollig
The other evening, I turned on my LG smart TV and opened the YouTube TV app to watch some live-streaming channels.
Lately, the video had been a bit blurry and choppy.
That night, it froze after about a minute, and all I saw was a spinning icon circle; it felt like seeing the Windows “blue screen of death.”
I could hear “Star Trek’s” Dr. Leonard McCoy saying, “The YouTube TV app is dead, Jim.”
As a retired telecom engineer, I used to resolve complex hardware and call routing problems involving multimillion-dollar digital and optical signaling network systems.
Before retirement, I diagnosed issues in Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) switching environments.
But there I was, in my living room, staring at a frozen YouTube TV video stream.
My other smart TV apps, Netflix, Prime Video, and Paramount+, all worked fine.
I also verified that the YouTube TV app played smoothly on my Hewlett-Packard laptop, my Google Assistant smart display, and my Samsung Galaxy smartphone.
All devices were connected, including my smart TV, via Wi-Fi through a wireless local area network (WLAN) on my Verizon 5G Home Internet gateway, the router in my home.
Since I have written about artificial intelligence (AI), I asked ChatGPT-5 from OpenAI for assistance.
I typed out the problem, listed what I had tried, and uploaded photos from the LG manual, the smart TV model label, the LG remote, and the on-screen messages I was seeing.
ChatGPT identified a likely adaptive bitrate (ABR) representation switch issue in the YouTube TV app’s webOS media player.
LG’s webOS is a Linux-based operating system.
When the app tried to improve video quality on my smart TV, it likely switched to a higher-bitrate segment of the same codec at a keyframe, known as an Instantaneous Decoder Refresh (IDR) frame.
Most video frames store only changes from prior frames, but a keyframe contains the complete picture.
When the video player encounters an IDR keyframe during an adaptive-bitrate (ABR) switch, it can discard older data, reset the decoder, and start again from that point without visual glitches or interruptions.
At that moment, the TV’s video pipeline should clear any buffered video data and reset the decoder. It should then load the next segment and continue playing.
A recent update to webOS or the YouTube TV app may have caused the playback issue, as the app froze during an adaptive-bitrate (ABR) transition because the reset did not complete.
And yes, I had deleted and reinstalled the YouTube TV app and reset the smart TV, but this did not immediately resolve the problem.
After completing a clean reinstall and full power reset, the newly installed app replaced the previous install, which a background update likely left in a bad state.
Reinstalling cleared cached files and settings, and the power reset cleared the TV’s memory and video decoder.
With a clean start, the player pulled a fresh playlist, picked a stable bitrate, and the video resumed.
The channels on the YouTube TV app played smoothly again on my LG smart TV.
Video playback for the YouTube TV app has been stable at high definition (HD) 720p and 60 frames per second (fps).
The smart TV is now set to auto update, which lets webOS refresh the system software and individual apps automatically.
I did some research on the history of smart TVs, with a focus on LG and its operating system, webOS.
Released in 2008, Samsung’s Series 7 (PAVV Bordeaux 750) was among the earliest connected TVs.
In 2009, Samsung added Yahoo-powered Internet@TV widgets (news, weather, stock) on select models.
It was the forerunner to today’s smart TVs.
Samsung introduced its Yahoo-powered “Internet@TV” widgets in 2009 on select models, offering on-screen apps like weather, news, and videos.
Google introduced Google TV, a smart TV platform, in May 2010.
“We want to use the internet to change the television experience. We’re putting a browser in the TV to enable a whole bunch of things,” said Vincent Dureau, Google’s head of TV technology, in the Aug. 19, 2010, Minneapolis Star Tribune.
Sony introduced the first high-definition TVs (HDTVs) powered by Google TV in October 2010.
LG’s history began in 1947 with the founding of Lucky Chemical Industrial Corporation by Koo In-hwoi (1907 to 1969).
In 1958, 11 years after founding his first company, In-hwoi started GoldStar Co., Ltd., marking his entry into the electronics industry.
For many years, Lucky Chemical focused on chemicals, while GoldStar focused on electronics.
In 1983, the parent company officially adopted the name Lucky-Goldstar, bringing Lucky Chemical and GoldStar together under one brand, now known as LG.
In 2009, Palm developed webOS, a Linux-based operating system, in Sunnyvale, CA. Hewlett-Packard acquired Palm in 2010 for $1.2 billion.
LG’s early NetCast smart TVs gained popularity by 2009, and the LG Smart TV brand was officially launched at CES 2011.
In 2013, LG acquired webOS from Hewlett-Packard and integrated it into its TV platform in 2014.
LG’s main office is in the LG Twin Towers in Seoul, South Korea.
I’m writing this four days after the clean reinstall and power reset, and the YouTube TV app continues to run smoothly on my smart TV.
With a bit of help from AI, this retired telecom tech solved one more problem.
