One developer used Ghidra and Claude Code to reverse-engineer LG's TV stack for a native Plex client

A post about an unofficial Plex client for LG televisions climbed past 1,150 points on r/singularity on 9 October, a lot of attention for a home-theatre utility. The client is PlxNative, written by one developer, Gleb Linnik, because the official Plex app on his older LG stutters: it is a web app inside the television's Chromium. What made the post travel was the method. Linnik reverse-engineered part of his TV's undocumented native media stack, using Ghidra, the NSA-released disassembler, together with Claude Code.

What PlxNative actually is

Almost all Rust, drawn on the GPU at 60 frames per second with no Chromium, no JavaScript and no web view; video is handed to the television's own hardware decoder. It supports 4K HEVC and Dolby Vision, resume, seek, chapters, audio and subtitle tracks, Skip Intro, Skip Credits, Up Next auto-advance, and progress reported back to the server. It needs webOS 4.0 or newer, with one tested exception, a 2016 set on webOS 3.4.3 through Developer Mode, and installs via LG Developer Mode or the webOS Homebrew Channel, no root required. The repository, GLinnik21/plx-native, is GPL-3.0-or-later and showed 477 stars, 37 forks and 1,528 commits on 9 October. It is not affiliated with Plex or LG.

The hard part was archaeology

LG ships no public native media SDK for ordinary developers, so the author had to find the interfaces himself. Writing the Rust was never the bottleneck; knowing which binaries to disassemble was. LLM assistance collapsed a task that once demanded a rare specialist into something one person could finish alone, without removing the need to know what to look for. The commit log shows the collaboration plainly: commits carry the trailer "Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5", and some messages reference Claude Code cloud sessions. A different project, as we reported, spent a force-push that same week removing exactly that kind of trailer from its history.

What the coverage adds

Android Authority wrote it up, noting the native Rust/OpenGL interface, while still relying on the set's hardware decoder for playback; quality therefore depends on the specific model. The developer has submitted the app to LG for official store review, which is where any claim about long-term support will be settled.

The skeptical reading

Every performance figure is the project's own measurement, and no independent party has benchmarked it. An unofficial client for a specific chipset is a narrow deliverable, not a general product, and one built on an undocumented native stack is exactly the kind that can break on a firmware update. The framing that made PlxNative a story on 9 October was not code generation but binary and protocol archaeology done by a solo developer with an assistant. That is a genuine expansion of what one person can attempt, and also a single data point.