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Please make your products work with URLs

anderspitman.net

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Re: Please make your products work with URLs

#221

Post by dvdgsng »

scrumbledober wrote: post #138
zeta0134 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've long since run with the notion that if you must have Smart TV features, do it with an external box. Last time I checked the Roku devices were decent for this, but there's a bunch of alternatives, and some lovely FOSS stuff (Kodi comes to mind) that is much more privacy focused. The TV itself is a black box of mystery, and does NOT get to go on my network. It doesn't need my wifi password, and I certainly don't w…

My last TV set I bought, I specifically looked for a non-smart TV. Got it for a bit cheaper than the smart models and there's no bloat. Everything else is handled by either PS4 or laptop via hdmi. I am not sure it's even possible to find non-smart TVs anymore.

impossible indeed. however a recent kickstarter is trying to change this: https://ironcast.tv/

lets hope they can deliver.

Re: Please make your products work with URLs

#222

Post by tzs »

zeta0134 wrote: post #30
jchw wrote: post #17

I hate smart TVs with a burning passion. They accomplish literally the bare minimum to keep people happy and sometimes not even that. Samsung’s Tizen OS is the most genuinely frustrating experience I’ve had with a consumer device outside of printing. Advertisements on my home screen that can’t be disabled, dubious privacy, bugs that require me to reboot my TV, and of course security so bad that they recommend install…

I've long since run with the notion that if you must have Smart TV features, do it with an external box. Last time I checked the Roku devices were decent for this, but there's a bunch of alternatives, and some lovely FOSS stuff (Kodi comes to mind) that is much more privacy focused. The TV itself is a black box of mystery, and does NOT get to go on my network. It doesn't need my wifi password, and I certainly don't w…

> I've long since run with the notion that if you must have Smart TV features, do it with an external box

I'd go farther. I want everything to be external boxes. Right now I'm looking at having to get a new A/V receiver because mine cannot handle 4K video. It does all the audio stuff I need just fine.

If video switching and audio processing was handled by separate boxes, I'd just be looking at changing out the video switching box.

Now suppose that later I decide I would like to be able to control my receiver with Alexa or Google Home. As it is now that will be another "replace the whole damn receiver" moment. If it were all separate boxes, the preamps, amps, surround sound processor, and radio receiver would all be separate components, controlled by a controller box. If I decide I want Alexa, I'd just buy a new Alexa compatible controller box.

Or I decide I want to upgrade from 5 channels to 7 channels...buy a couple more amp boxes and speakers for the new channels (and might also need a new surround sound processor box).

Basically, take a block diagram of a complete full featured home theater system, and make every block in that a separate box so I can (1) just buy the boxes I need for my system, and (2) upgrade a box at a time.

That said, I doubt TV makers will ever stop primarily making Smart TVs. A Smart TV can function as the only component of a home theater system. Someone moving into their first apartment after school, say, wanting to start putting together their entertainment system can start with a Smart TV, stick it on their home internet, and then use the Netflix/Prime/Disney+/etc app on the TV to watch movies.

That Smart TV probably has a few HDMI in ports, so they can also use it with the cable box if they have cable, and with their gaming consoles.

With a dumb TV they'd need the TV, and they would need an A/V receiver, and speakers, and something to run the Netflix/etc. apps. Buying all that at once might be a budget buster for someone starting out.

By making the TVs smart, the TV makers greatly increase the chances that a TV will be the first component bought for a new home theater setup, and probably also increases the chances that that first TV will be a big screen, high resolution, high quality display model.

Re: Please make your products work with URLs

#223

Post by dvdgsng »

causality0 wrote: post #172
satysin wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with your frustrations about smart TVs but I also like the setup I have with my TV. I bought an LG OLED last summer (a 55" C9) and to be honest I don't hate the software (webOS) on it. However my setup is not really normal . Firstly my TV is connected via Ethernet to my router and is restricted to only Netflix, the LG web store and my internal network. I don't watch live TV, instead my viewing is limited to N…

I fear that soon we're going to need an open-source alternative to Plex. Increasingly aggressive monetization seems to be creeping into the Plex experience. I keep finding things I don't own and don't want showing up on my home screen. "Suggested movies" and "Suggested podcasts" and the like. You can prune them back but a few months later you find some other garbage you don't want.

> I fear that soon we're going to need an open-source alternative to Plex.

Alternative: Emby https://emby.media/

Open-Source Alternative: Jellyfin (fork of Emby v3) https://jellyfin.org/

Re: Please make your products work with URLs

#224

Post by SketchySeaBeast »

JohnFen wrote: post #146
Enginerrrd wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depends, but generally yes, for now. In the near future though you're likely to see smart TV's and similar devices with dedicated SIM cards and cellular modems that can't be disabled.

> similar devices with dedicated SIM cards and cellular modems that can't be disabled. All such radios can be disabled, if not by removing the antenna, then by enclosing it in a faraday cage. It is chilling, though, that these things may become necessary for basic things like appliances.

It also really affects the viewing angle.

Re: Please make your products work with URLs

#225

Post by SergeAx »

I've got the most dumb TV in the world at home. It's about 10 years old, biggest one for sane price at the time, 50" 1080p. When I want to watch a movie - I download it onto a thumb drive and just watch it from there, plain and simple. When I want to watch a YouTube there for some cryptic reason - I connect it to notebook via HDMI cable.

I feel that I soon will have to change it for some more fancy set, like 65” 4K HDR OLED. I will make my best to dumb it down and keep using it in the same manner. And I definitely will not connect it to the internet!

Re: Please make your products work with URLs

#226

Post by anderspitman »

danShumway wrote: post #144
anderspitman wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please see my explanation here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22038862

Even without adding a build step, would you be willing to add a tag to your index.html that just linked to the Github repo in general? It wouldn't even need to be specific to each individual post. While admittedly some readers here are purely focusing on the irony of supporting "the primitive, simple case", for the most part non-JS users are willing to meet sites halfway on this. I'm totally fine manually navigating…

> Even without adding a build step, would you be willing to add a tag to your index.html that just linked to the Github repo in general

Absolutely! Should be working now (or as soon as CloudFlare cache is purged). Thanks for the snippet.

Re: Please make your products work with URLs

#227

Post by falcolas »

apitman wrote: post #98

Author here. Sorry for those having trouble viewing the site. That's obviously never the intention. The current incarnation is actually a bit of an experiment. Unfortunately, my blog is only occasionally tested against front page traffic so I don't always get a feel for what's not working. That said, I assure you I am intimately familiar with the tradeoffs of different methods of delivering HTML. TL;DR it's my person…

Personal, and perhaps unkind opinion. This whole paragraph amounts to "it's my site and I can do what I want", which is not a great reason to expect one thing of others, but not yourself.

> First, having a build step creates a dependency on both the build tool and a specific action.

Instead, you push that compute off on your readers; actively harming the environment in the process. Yes, in this day and age I feel it's quite justifiable to point that out. You could render it once and be done with it, but instead you chose to have it be rendered (inefficiently) tens or hundreds of thousands of times, consuming orders of magnitude more energy and generating heat, all to "avoid a dependency". This should be, in this day and age, morally reprehensible.

I'd also point out the irony of the dependency upon javascript for static pages.

> Second, I wanted user interactions within my site to be very fast

A HTML page load from your site with a cold cache 114ms, of which 41ms is connection and TLS overhead, with a fetch time of 70ms. With all of the following requests it's up around 1s before it's rendered (and I'm on a Ryzen-powered gaming computer and fiber). A subsequent fetch of the assets to build one of your other pages is 71 ms (connection re-use means there's no connect time and no TLS time). This time is roughly the same no matter what article or page I pull up.

TL;DR: it's not making your other pages faster. It's just making your first page slower.

Re: Please make your products work with URLs

#228

Post by satyrnein »

tzs wrote: post #222
zeta0134 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've long since run with the notion that if you must have Smart TV features, do it with an external box. Last time I checked the Roku devices were decent for this, but there's a bunch of alternatives, and some lovely FOSS stuff (Kodi comes to mind) that is much more privacy focused. The TV itself is a black box of mystery, and does NOT get to go on my network. It doesn't need my wifi password, and I certainly don't w…

> I've long since run with the notion that if you must have Smart TV features, do it with an external box I'd go farther. I want everything to be external boxes. Right now I'm looking at having to get a new A/V receiver because mine cannot handle 4K video. It does all the audio stuff I need just fine. If video switching and audio processing was handled by separate boxes, I'd just be looking at changing out the video…

20 years ago, I was making the same argument about desktops vs laptops. I was also carefully selecting which stick of ram to buy. Now, the whole world buys laptops, except for gamers and linux users. I don't think non-enthusiasts want to think about that many boxes and arrows.

Re: Please make your products work with URLs

#229

Post by anderspitman »

darkwater wrote: post #208
anderspitman wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds cool. How easy is it to do what I talk about in the blog post and send it a URL from my phone?

With Kodi it's dead easy, actually I was thinking about it while reading your post: "he should use Kodi"

I think I probably should. But I also think I shouldn't have to. This is the first time the Roku has let me down.

Re: Please make your products work with URLs

#230

Post by mbreese »

anderspitman wrote: post #176
mbreese wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, this is very much an HTTP thing. When you request a resource over a URL, you should get the resource... instead with their site you get an HTML page with a bunch of javascript includes... that then retrieves content. It works, but it is opposite of what they are arguing for. Now, this is this person's personal site... they can do what they want. But it's pretty ironic to put a rant about working with URLs on a si…

The URL does work. I don't say anything in the post about reading what's on the other end. What you're saying would be like if I had said in the article that I should be able to give the Roku a video format it doesn't support and expect it to work. My website should work for anyone using a browser with default settings. I never claimed it was a static HTML site. It's an interactive JavaScript application.

I feel like you’re arguing for two completely orthogonal ideas. Either you get the resource with the request or you don’t.

The resource you get with your site is the same thing regardless of what the URL requested is. There is then JavaScript logic that loads more information based on the path. The content is then dynamically added to the DOM. This is how your site works, right?

In this model, you never actually get the content with an HTTP request. You get code that runs that contains/displays the content. From the HTTP point of view, the resource is the code. If you don’t execute the code, you don’t get the content.

This is a perfectly fine way to run a website. I have zero issues with this. And as you say, this ship has largely sailed.

But — what you are asking for in your post is the ability to hand a URL to a media player and have that content play. What would happen if the content site had the same setup as your site (without any special configuration like supporting YouTube URLs, etc)? What is the HTTP request returned a JavaScript wrapper around everything and not the actual video?

The Roku could very well support a video format and still not be able to play the content on such a site. And the kicker is — a web browser would probably work just fine and the user would have no idea why their URL wasn’t working on their TV.

This is why there have to be tools to extract YouTube videos to download. For sites like YouTube, the URL isn’t a simple resource locator. It’s a link to a bunch of code that needs to be run to get to the video.

What I think you’re missing is that it isn’t just the client authors who need to support URLs, but also the server authors. If you have a small local HTTP server that just sends raw files, that’s easy. But loading something like YouTube isn’t as simple as supporting HTTP requests. And there is a certain irony in publishing a post that asks for clients to support working with URLs on such a site design.

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