U0492: Invalid Data Received From Television
What to do
This one is very often not a fault at all, and it is worth knowing before anybody charges you to investigate it.
Some cars were built with a television receiver — mostly large luxury cars, conversions and motorhomes. Nearly all of those tuners now receive nothing, because the broadcasts they were designed for have been switched off. A module saying it has no signal is telling the truth. There is nothing to repair, because the transmitter is what disappeared.
The other common case is that your car never had one at all. If any of the entertainment equipment has been replaced with a second-hand unit from a better-specified car, your car may have been told it has a television it does not have. That is a coding correction, and there is no fault to find.
Either way the car drives normally and nothing is at risk. If the equipment is genuinely there and genuinely obsolete, ask for it to be coded out properly rather than paying to chase a standard that no longer exists.
What this code means
The television module is broadcasting data that cannot be accepted as true. See U0400 for the family's framing.
This is the clearest example in the corpus of a code that most often reports something perfectly correct, and saying so plainly is more useful than a diagnosis.
The standard provides for a broadcast television receiver, and vehicles genuinely carried them — in markets where in-car television was offered, on large luxury saloons, and on conversions and motorhomes. Almost every one of those tuners is now receiving nothing, because the analogue broadcasts they were built for have been switched off across most of the world and the digital standards that replaced them are not what the tuner speaks.
So a module reporting no signal is reporting the truth, and a code arising from it is not evidence of a failure. Nothing can be repaired, because nothing is broken — the transmitter is gone.
The second common case is the opposite: the vehicle does not have one. Manufacturers reuse this code number for a video input, a rear screen or a media interface, and a head unit or gateway coded for a specification the vehicle was not built to reports equipment that was never installed — the U0446 argument again, and the usual consequence of second-hand infotainment components.
Which leaves a short and honest instruction. Establish whether the vehicle has the equipment; if it does not, correct the coding; if it does and the broadcasts it needs no longer exist, the sensible outcome is to have the module properly decommissioned rather than to spend money making a dead standard work.
Likely causes
Start here
- Module not coded to the vehicle · specialist
- Aftermarket head unit fitted in place of the original · moderate
- Corroded or loose connector · easy
Less common
- Second hand module locked to another vehicle · specialist
- Damaged data bus wiring · moderate
- Damaged wiring harness · moderate
Symptoms
Components involved
Information, not instruction
CarGeek is a reference, not a service manual. Its pages are written from public sources and from what other people have found, never from a manufacturer's own service information, so they can be wrong or incomplete for your particular vehicle. Some of what they describe carries real risk: high voltage, fuel under pressure, stored energy, hot and moving parts.
Have anything you intend to act on checked by a trained person against the manufacturer's own procedure for your vehicle. Nothing here replaces that procedure.
Community experience
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What makes one worth reading:
- The car — make, model, year and engine. The same fault behaves differently on each.
- What you measured, not only what you replaced.
- What actually fixed it — or that nothing did, which is worth knowing too.
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