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Show HN: If YouTube had actual channels

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Re: Show HN: If YouTube had actual channels

#371

Post by gerdesj »

DavidPiper wrote: post #355
eCa wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not the parent, but with similar view on panned audio. If it's music where it's done on purpose, no problem. But talking with audio in one ear? I'm out. Not sure why exactly, but it's very jarring. For me, it's one of the worst audio quality issues a video can have.

As someone with minor but noticeable hearing issues, the reason it's so jarring is because our brain's audio processing center depends on both ears for understanding human speech. If you're deaf in one ear, your ability to hear and understand speech in particular goes down a lot, even if someone is talking on your good side. Put that person in a noisy crowd and it's game over.

>> Put that person in a noisy crowd and it's game over.

That's when you discover you can lip read to a certain degree. There is way more to it than that. Speech is only one of the sets of cues we use when discoursing. Hand gestures, body posture, facial expressions and more are all involved too.

I'm somewhat deaf in both ears, worse in one and always have been. I have had tinnitus since birth. My deafness does not affect all frequencies equally. Thankfully its mostly the high frequencies that have gone a bit dark and the tinnitus may be largely to blame.

Anyway, your senses are all linked up and your brain is rather good at making connections to try and make up for deficiencies in some areas by co-opting other bits. I have minor lip reading skills to augment my hearing. I can't help it! I also swivel somewhat to try and deploy my better ear as the situation allows. One must try and maintain decorum and not look too weird 8)

"If you're deaf in one ear, your ability to hear and understand speech in particular goes down a lot, even if someone is talking on your good side. Put that person in a noisy crowd and it's game over."

This sounds like personal experience. I don't know how old you are but give it time ...

Re: Show HN: If YouTube had actual channels

#372

Post by fmj »

lackstein wrote: post #123
l72 wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've also been using ErsatzTV with my jellyfin setup. It can take a while to setup channels how you want them, but I love my sci-fi channel which is going through all the Star Treks, Stargates, and Twilight Zones. It is so much easier to flip it on to my Sci-fi Channel, animation channel, movie channel, or James Bond marathon channel then to decide what to watch. And since I've seen all this content, it is often kind…

> I also found a ton of old Nickelodeon, Cartoon Network, and Adult Swim bumps Where were you able to find these? Recreating one of these channels has been a side project I’ve wanted to do for ages.

There's a torrent going around the usual places that has every [as] bump from the launch of the network to whenever they last updated the archive (a few months ago in my case.)

Re: Show HN: If YouTube had actual channels

#373

Post by fmj »

notfed wrote: post #111
tantalor wrote: post #6

The best part of this is the channel doesn't pause when you flip away from it. It is always "running" and if you flip away you will miss it. That builds in a FOMO trade-off which causes user to automatically/subconciously decide on channel they most want to watch, because they can't watch everything.

Another observation: with this setup, you essentially randomly jump into the middle of videos, skipping what is usually the most grating part of the show: the intro. In the intro to most shows/videos, there's annoying jingles, silly animations, a redundant summary of what's about to happen in an already short segment, or just useless chatter "hey guys! it's your boy, _. welcome to my channel, remember to smash that l…

It's no longer functional, but in the past if you appended the parameter t=wadsworth to a YouTube URL it would skip the first 30% of a video.

Re: Show HN: If YouTube had actual channels

#374

Post by laserDinosaur »

slazaro wrote: post #72

I'd echo the sentiment that this is amazing, and that a TV guide would be awesome. I'd also suggest maybe adding the channel names (like the comment you posted here) to the app itself (although i think it's cool when it's unnamed and you get the old-school feeling of channels just being numbers). Also, I'd love to have permalinks for the channels. Not for the individual videos themselves, but just a link that when sh…

>Another thing, although probably outside your control, is that I use a Firefox extension called "SoundFixer" that I use to force the youtube audio to mono

In windows you can also go to "Ease of access audio settings" and click "Turn on mono audio". Useful for games which have positional audio which gets annoying (sf6 training room for example).

Re: Show HN: If YouTube had actual channels

#375

Post by madrox »

confused_boner wrote: post #271
madrox wrote: post #267

Well done. My team built this at Disney six years ago when we were trying to solve content discovery problems. The problem with endless carousels of thumbnails is that it really doesn't draw you in. Sometimes you just need to drop people into content like it's channel surfing. Netflix tried something similar a few years ago, but in my opinion it missed a critical ingredient, which was dropping people into the middle…

could that be solved by finding and using the 'most replayed' mark timestamps for each video and using that to find the best start points for each video

Depends on the content and how it tends to be consumed. That might work for YouTube but maybe not, say, Netflix or services that stream movies.

We did a mix of human curation and random selection, noting which random selections were successful and which were not. It was effective enough. The thing about an experience like this is that it doesn't need to be perfect. Like channel surfing, if it doesn't catch you then just switch the channel.

Re: Show HN: If YouTube had actual channels

#376

Post by madrox »

newswasboring wrote: post #270
madrox wrote: post #267

Well done. My team built this at Disney six years ago when we were trying to solve content discovery problems. The problem with endless carousels of thumbnails is that it really doesn't draw you in. Sometimes you just need to drop people into content like it's channel surfing. Netflix tried something similar a few years ago, but in my opinion it missed a critical ingredient, which was dropping people into the middle…

Can you give any insight into why these projects were canceled at Disney or Netflix?

I can't speak to Netflix. At Disney the willingness to experiment with streaming UX was thin on the ground six years ago. It was about making something that felt like a direct Netflix competitor. Other experiments have shipped since then, like co-viewing.

I actually believe TikTok is more of the spiritual inheritor of this kind of project more than any other platform.

Re: Show HN: If YouTube had actual channels

#377

Post by madrox »

steve_adams_86 wrote: post #314
madrox wrote: post #267

Well done. My team built this at Disney six years ago when we were trying to solve content discovery problems. The problem with endless carousels of thumbnails is that it really doesn't draw you in. Sometimes you just need to drop people into content like it's channel surfing. Netflix tried something similar a few years ago, but in my opinion it missed a critical ingredient, which was dropping people into the middle…

Part of the issue with endless carousels of thumbnails now is that the thumbnails are almost invariable clickbait now. What will I actually get? I have no idea. Even YouTube channels I genuinely enjoy use thumbnails which are entirely different from the actual content. I suppose sensationalism has taken over.

You can't blame creators for playing the game. All they have is that thumbnail to market their content.

Re: Show HN: If YouTube had actual channels

#378

Post by bananamerica »

opan wrote: post #344
eCa wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not the parent, but with similar view on panned audio. If it's music where it's done on purpose, no problem. But talking with audio in one ear? I'm out. Not sure why exactly, but it's very jarring. For me, it's one of the worst audio quality issues a video can have.

If you have mpv+yt-dlp set up you can fix this with an audio filter to mix to mono. mpv --audio-channels=mono 'urlhere' Somewhat related, I've used --vf=lavfi="hflip" to fix videos which are annoyingly mirrored to avoid copyright. You could also bind these options to keys in mpv to use on the fly. Some videos will only mirror some parts of their footage. Another fun one I bind in input.conf ctrl+shift+r cycle_values…

That's super complicated lol. Why not use the browser extension or accessibility feature?

Re: Show HN: If YouTube had actual channels

#379

Post by shiroiushi »

slazaro wrote: post #350
Kiro wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> since a lot of channels are annoying to me using headphones, they pan the audio sources too hard left/right and it's super distracting I find this interesting. Are you oversensitive? I've never even considered that this could be an issue. Do you experience the same problem with other things like music and games?

In the real world you almost never hear something on one ear but not the other. Even if something is on your left, your right ear still hears it (differences in timing and volume inform your brain on the sound source location). Exception being if it's something really quiet right next to one ear, but that's relatively rare. So when things are mixed "improperly" (it's subjective), it's very distracting to me. I don't…

>In the real world you almost never hear something on one ear but not the other. Even if something is on your left, your right ear still hears it

Exactly, and this highlights the big difference between using headphones and using speakers. When you listen to some stereophonic music with one of the instruments panned completely to one side, through speakers that sound will only play from that side, however the sound will bounce around your room and you'll hear it in both ears, and the difference will tell you where it's coming from. But when you listen through headphones, you don't get this effect, and it sounds weird. With modern computing devices, it shouldn't be that hard to run the music through a filter that mixes the two channels when using headphones to avoid this problem. I wouldn't want to mix them to mono (that sounds bad too), but just a slight reduction of the stereo separation would be good.

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