A new version of webOS TV, version 5.x, was added to LG's webOS TV Developer website in February 2020.

Chromium 68

The new documentation reads that the updated web engine is Chromium 68. The Chromium version supported in 4.X is Chromium 53. So what did Google add to Chrome in those 15 version updates which might be relevant?

Chrome Version Features
54 Custom Elements v1, Element.requestFullScreen() on screen rotation event
55 Persistent Storage
56 Web Bluetooth API
57 Media Session API, but on Chrome for Android
58 IndexedDB 2.0, Fullscreen PWA
59 Image Capture API
60 WebAssembly
61 WebUSB
62 Network Information API improvements
63
64 ResizeObserver
65
66 BitmapRenderer
67 Desktop PWA
68 Payment Handler API

The addition of support for WebAssembly, and the lurking potential for Progressive Web Apps (PWA), is perhaps the most interesting. The latter of course depends on how LG is planning to utilise PWAs.

User Agent

The new user agent is:

Mozilla/5.0 (Web0S; Linux/SmartTV) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/68.0.3440.106 Safari/537.36 WebAppManager

Supported Media

The page on supported Media and DRM located at http://webostv.developer.lge.com/discover/specifications/supported-media-formats/ has been updated mid March.

Some notable updates:

  • HLS: version 7 instead of version 5.
  • MSE: W3C Recommendation 17 November 2016 instead of W3C Proposed Recommendation 04 October 2016.
  • EME: W3C Recommendation 18 September 2017 instead of W3C Working Draft 31 March 2015.
  • PlayReady version 4.0 instead of PlayReady version 3.0.
  • Widevine Modular version 15 instead of Widevine Modular version 14.

Some guesses:

Remarks