maddening TV issues
the journal of Michael Werneburg
twenty-eight years and a million words
We've been having problems with the sound-bar for our television dropping out all the time. I looked into it online and many people had linked it to wifi dropouts. So I bought a small network switch and a wifi range extender and now have a workaround for the sound-bar's notoriously poor wifi client.
The wifi range extender and the main wifi router (which is on the second floor) are from the same manufacturer, and I bought the extender having read that together they could create a "mesh" network, meaning that our phones and laptops would automatically connect to the closer of the two wireless access points wherever we were in the house. But there was a problem: the firmware available for our model in Japan doesn't yet support the mesh. I wrote to the manufacturer and the (almost) English response was that I'd just have to wait.
Sooo I didn't wait. I noticed that the router model we have goes by a different name in the US and downloaded the US-market firmware and installed that. And, success!
But then the TV stopped connecting to Netflix. Looking at the (Japanese only) diagnostics on the TV I saw that everything was working except the DNS. Throwing another 45 minutes of research at it I found that this manufacturer's mesh systems seem to have a problem with common DNS providers like 8.8.8.8 and 1.1.1.1. So I decoupled the mesh and right away everything started working.
Now the sound-bar is still having drop-outs but the TV's network works better than it ever did on wifi so I've taken one step forward (albeit not the one I intended). However the TV is flickering when on HDMI input, and I suspect there's a problem with the TV's electronics. Both the flickering and the sound-bar dropouts could be caused by that.
I'm going to write to the friend-of-a-friend who sold me the sound-bar.