Updating the firmware on a Panasonic Viera TC-L37X1 without the stock remote

I figured I’d make a post on this, simply because I lost a metric ton of sleep over this, googling around for answers, and getting nothing but spam and people trying to sell or review this TV.

My Viera decided to randomly stop accepting input from any of the 3 HDMI ports, and reading reviews on this TV, it seemed to be pretty reliable. So, I looked around, and it seemed that the firmware was up-gradable on this TV. I poked around Panasonic’s site before finding the proper firmware file, which needed to be loaded on to an SD card, which in turn needed to be inserted into the TV’s SD slot.

I managed to do this fine, up until I needed the directional controls to tell the TV that yes, I wanted to flash this firmware to the TV. The side buttons should, in theory, allow you to manipulate the TV in this way, but it does not. You can smash the buttons on the side until doomsday and the TV will just ignore you.

At this point, I went out and bought a cheap Philips universal remote that had directional controls on the front of it. (It also has 3 devices it can control: TV, DVD, and Cable box.)

Setup was a snap, but lo and behold, the directional controls did not work. I had almost thought I was out the $8 I paid for it, but in one last effort before I gave up, I cracked the manual, and saw that the remote automatically maps buttons to functions, and the mappings may not always be correct. In this case, the directional buttons were controlling volume and channel.

The manual detailed a process for overriding the automatic button mapping and making the remote choose a different function for the directional keys. Eventually, through trial and error, they finally worked!

(tl;dr version: You will need a remote to do the firmware update, and you should make sure the directional keys on your remote are reprogrammable, because some remotes just assign them to volume and channel. The good thing is, you can do this with a cheap, $7 remote, so it shouldn’t be too expensive.)

(PS: No, this didn’t fix my HDMI ports. Sadface.)

This was posted 9 months ago. It has 44 notes.
  1. exxodium posted this