What TVProber is
TVProber is a desktop application for engineers and QA who build television apps. It pairs with a real LG webOS or Samsung Tizen TV on the local network, installs the latest .ipk or .wgt build with one click, launches it, and streams the device's logs and network traffic back into the app while you watch the TV through a webcam in the same window. Project page over on sobytes.com/projects/tvprober.
It exists because the official toolchains are powerful and slow to live with. The webOS CLI, the Tizen Studio device manager, the IDE plugins, the certificate dance, the developer mode session timers, the Chromium inspector URL you have to dig out of a log line every time you reconnect. TVProber wraps all of that in a single surface so a developer can stay in the loop the build, install, watch, fix loop, without breaking flow.
What's in the suite
A TV Remote panel sends key events to the paired set, so you can drive the app from your laptop instead of hunting for the physical remote. A Settings panel pairs new devices, manages developer mode keys, and stores per device profiles. A Build App panel watches the local project folder, runs the right packager (ares for webOS, tizen for Tizen), and produces a fresh .ipk or .wgt ready to install. An Installed Apps view shows what's on the device and lets you reinstall, uninstall, or relaunch with one click.
A Webcam panel points at the actual TV. That sounds silly until you've spent an afternoon swivelling in a chair to look across the room every time the app crashes. Having the screen in the same window as the logs turns a slow feedback loop into a fast one.
Logs, network, and a real debugger
The Logs tab streams everything the app prints, with a level filter (Log, Info, Warn, Error), free text search, and colour coding by severity. The Network tab captures the device's HTTP traffic from the running app, so you can see exactly which manifest, which segment, or which license request just failed without opening another tool.
When the app launches on a webOS set, TVProber surfaces the application debugging URL directly. One click copies it and opens the Chromium inspector pointed at the device, so you can set breakpoints in your TV app from your laptop's browser. No more grepping the device log for the inspector port.
Why I built it
I've been building TV apps for the better part of a decade and the developer experience has barely moved. The same dance, the same workarounds, the same lost hour every Monday because a developer mode session expired over the weekend. TVProber is the tool I wanted on day one: pair the TV, press build, press install, watch the logs, fix the bug, repeat.
It's also the tool I want every engineer on a TV project to share, so a QA tester can install yesterday's build on the bedroom TV and capture a clean log for a bug ticket without me having to walk them through SDK setup first.
Where it's going
Next on the list: Fire TV and Android TV support so the same install, launch, log, debug loop covers every screen a streaming app actually ships to. After that, shared sessions, so a developer in one country and a QA tester in another can drive the same TV from the same TVProber window.
The video above is a short walkthrough of the app in action: pairing a real LG webOS set, building and installing a fresh .ipk, watching the logs stream in, and opening the Chromium inspector with one click. More detail and screenshots on the project page at sobytes.com/projects/tvprober.