Building A Budget Ambilight TV With WLED! (UNDER £70!)

every every every I is for [Music] you hey guys and welcome to the show my name is Alex and this is techflow but more importantly welcome to this empty Corner in the studio and today well hopefully this isn't going to be so empty by the end of the video so I think if this works it's going to be one of my craziest LED product projects today now if you haven't heard of the Ambi light TVs they're basically a TV with a built-in backlight and they're quite expensive they basically mimic what's on the TV and then with LEDs display it around the TV it's a really cool effect and if you don't have one of these TVs you can buy kits from like Philips hu and goie to basically do the same thing but they're really really expensive and all clunky at the same time needing a capture card or a camera to physically see what's on the screen now the basic running theme for this video is budget I want to do this on a budget and I want it to work well not quite sure how we're going to do it yet though now last week Jed and I took a trip to our local hardware store to brainstorm and get some ideas we actually ended up leaving with a tub of pain and some wood and we came back and built a false wall to add some character to the end of this room see if she comes off in one F swoop that's such a shame let's Kickstart this project looking at the TV we're going to mimic sticking to our our high-end cost effective theme this is the Panasonic MZ 800 this is more midt budget friendly but still ticks all of those boxes one of them hopefully you can see on screen now with those Inky blacks this is yes an OLED panel at sub £1,000 for a 55 in and that is pretty unheard of and we'll talk more about the panel once it's installed a little bit later let's get to work [Music] you're probably thinking Alex what is this big piece of painted wood you've got in your hand and this is something that we knocked up last week not 100% sure if this is going to be the final product but we put a paint of coat over this that actually matches paint of coat yeah coat of paint a coat of paint on this um but we don't know if this is going to be the finished product we may put some acup panel on here I'm not sure yet but basically we've just reinforced this with some 3x two and then put this in the middle so this can hopefully hold the weight of the TV which isn't actually that heavy which is nice but first LEDs and a custom W LED controller that we need to configure so the LED effects behind this TV are going to look [Music] nuts look at that that is literally the perfect size LED strip that we needed I don't believe it that never happens that's [Music] unreal got you very happy very happy with that we're running the Android effect now on the W LEDs that looks awesome time to get this thing on the [Music] wall okay so on my phone I have the IP address of the W LED controller it's all installed I'm actually super buzzed about how clean this W LED install is I've got control of the lights wirelessly from my phone and I can also go ahead and do loads of cool effects as you can see this is going to look so much better once it's on the wall though that's sick so there is our bracket installed on the back of the TV it's nice to see that obviously Panasonic are including the war bracket mounts but like normal with Panasonic TVs they include a really Hefty Mount and this thing is really really heavy so if you are going to put this thing on a tabletop you'll be absolutely sound but for us we're going to stick it on the wall I think it's going to look sick [Music] so guys this is pretty crazy I am so thrilled that we are here and we've done this journey together if you take a look at some of these photos that well I was given when I was buying this house you can see exactly what this room looked like to start with and now here we are you can see that behind the TV my LED effect which is mirroring what's on the TV that's working perfectly and we'll talk about how I've done that so cheaply in a second but first I want to talk a little bit about the tech that's making all this come together and let's start with that awesome budget friendly panel from Panasonic this thing is the MZ 800 and it comes in 42 48 55 and 65 in variants and it was a perfect choice for this project considering how budget friendly it is considering all the features that you get with it much like the LED system that we've installed around it this 55 in behind me currently has 600 off and it's currently under 1,000 sat at 999 so what does that pretty penny get you some of the standouts for me is the fact that this is an OLED TV and if you can jump up from an LED to an OLED panel you will notice a massive difference in pretty much everything not just the fact that the blacks are Inky black but the contrast will pop too it's also got the latest HDMI high standard which is 2.1 and that comes with some great features like Alm or Auto low latency mode it can detect when you connect something like a games console and put the TV into its correct settings automatically as well as e support for connecting things like Soundbars and receivers like we've done here with our Tower speakers but regardless of that the inbuilt speakers aren't an afterthought here they've actually built a subwoofer into the back of this panel too sounds Ace it's also got the 4K color engine Pro which in a nutshell if you feed this TV SDR content which let's face it most content still is it will enhance that image to make it pop like each HDR content and this really does work the last thing I like about it is it's got Android TV my favorite OS on a TV there's very minimal advertising on here there's no massive banner ads across it and you've got access to the Google Play library which is awesome for basically any apps you want and you've got the Google Assistant button baked into the remote so you can basically quickly launch apps and find the shows you want without having to use an awful onscreen keyboard I'll put all the links to the MZ 800 in the description so you can check the latest offers on the panel now let's talk about how we've done this awesome light display around the TV now you guys must have seen our previous videos where we've talked about W LED which is where you use an ESP board to control a set of Lights now as I mentioned at the start of the video the kits to have this effect with LEDs around the TV that mirror what's on the TV it's expensive whereas here all we're doing is utilizing a fairly inexpensive wled setup at around £60 and a cool piece of software that can be installed on Windows Mac or even on a Raspberry Pi and it's called hyper HDR now it is quite intimidating when you first load this piece of software up but it basically runs on a device and then you can control it via a web page all of the wed controllers on your network have their own IP address so it's important to say a static IP address so you know which controller you're controlling you can then enter this IP address into the hyper HDR software and it will connect to the LED strip the next thing to do is to choose an input source now if this was going to be a more permanent setup you'd buy a really inexpensive USB capture card so the software knows what's actually on the screen no need for any bulky cameras here or if you're using a computer the software can simply just capture the screen the next thing to do is to input how many individual LED pixels you have around your display I have 150 and then it's a case of just playing with the alignment until it all lines up so if you guys have enjoyed a light rating would be awesome please send us some pictures of your iper HDR and wled installs if you manage to pull this up at home and as always massive thanks to Panasonic for sending out the panel for this project it's really fitting nicely and we could not be happier with how this looks my name's been Alex this has been techflow and we'll see you in in the next one [Music] [Music] peace

Channel: TechFlow

Views: 15,051

Keywords: techflow, techflow review, New tech, new technology, alex brooks, marzbar, diy led, hypperoin wled, wled tv, ambilight wled, cheap ambilight, wled cheap, cool technology, new tech

Id: WQVR4njb8Pk

Length: 9min 23sec (563 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 03 2024