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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

#301

Post by bookofjoe »

justinclift wrote: post #166
bookofjoe wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I hate smart TVs with a burning passion. Me too! When I bought a new Samsung 32" last year, I went very, very slowly as I set it up, so as not to inadvertently connect it to the internet. I succeeded in not connecting and life is good.

Pretty sure some tv's scan the local wifi networks looking for way to call home. Not sure if Samsung is one of the manufacturers of those though.

Yes! As I recall, a screen came up with a bunch of local wifi networks — including my own two — asking me to put in a password to connect. I was able to move on to the next screen without doing so, and I was home free.

Re: Please make your products work with URLs

#302

Post by anderspitman »

X-Cubed wrote: post #66

This is the sort of use-case that the DLNA specification was intended for. It's not quite as simple as the author might want, but it is well supported. The TV can act as a Renderer for content pushed to it, or as a Player for content pulled from a Server. All the smart TVs I've used implement this functionality. VLC and Kodi support this too. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Living_Network_Allianc...

Any idea how to do this on a Roku TV with a video URL? Because I couldn't figure it out.

Re: Please make your products work with URLs

#303

Post by anderspitman »

mongol wrote: post #69

> However, there doesn't seem to be any widely implemented standard for playing plain URLs, only walled gardens like the YouTube app. Actually, I think the standard is UPnP / DLNA. After setting up a UPNP server I can "cast" most things from Android by using the share button, and then choosing a UPnP app, such as Bubble UPnP. I don't know if the author's tv supports this, but many do.

Why should I have to run a separate server to play a video from URL?

Re: Please make your products work with URLs

#304

Post by anderspitman »

skybrian wrote: post #254
pjc50 wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Inefficient compared to what? Fundamentally you have to shift the same N bits per second at a reasonably uniform speed regardless of how the transfer is done. Your main enemy in this process is, as usual, middleboxes, which may be a bigger problem for the advanced protocols. This is why Apple created the bizarre but effective HLS system: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP_Live_Streaming

Inefficient compared to whatever optimized, adaptive, video-oriented protocols Netscape, YouTube, and Chromecast are using. I'm wondering how much you lose by doing it the simple way?

I'm assuming most video streaming is done over HTTP these days, as sad as that is. But now you have me wondering if the big boys are using something different.

Re: Please make your products work with URLs

#305

Post by 1auralynn »

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 had two Samsung smart TVs, neither of which were capable of letting me share my screen from a Samsung Galaxy phone..... (well, technically, I did get it to work once or twice, but I'm very good at troubleshooting and it took me over an hour and three different apps).

Re: Please make your products work with URLs

#306

Post by mirimir »

satyrnein wrote: post #150
mirimir wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hate them too. So I just have a large monitor. > You can’t really run many 10 ft versions of things ... Huh? My media server is in a ventilated closet, so I'm using ~15 meter HDMI, USB and audio cables. It was admittedly an expensive HDMI cable, but it seems to work well enough.

I believe they're referring to a 10 ft UI, meaning optimized for viewing from 10 feet away (bigger text, not requiring precise mouse clicks, etc).

Oh, I see -- "10ft UI".

Isn't it easy to tweak all that? It is in Debian, anyway.

Re: Please make your products work with URLs

#307

Post by GuiA »

crazygringo wrote: post #100

I don't believe I've ever, once, in my entire history of browsing the internet, come across a direct hyperlink to a video file to play in the browser. Virtually universally, videos are embedded in webpages, and occasionally a link is provided that downloads rather than plays a video. So I think this is just a use-case issue: the average user is exceedingly unlikely to ever want to watch a raw video file specified by…

The issue is that software products support such “computational primitives” and their manipulation increasingly less. Things that were taken as granted in any computational environment - dragging and dropping pictures, copying text, seeing the file underlying a certain representation, etc. - doesn’t even work in many of today’s apps. It’s a huge step backwards in our systems, and is a big part of the reason why “no one knows how to use computers anymore”.

Re: Please make your products work with URLs

#308

Post by huehehue »

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…

I support separate modules for everything, and am amused at the thought of connecting a Roku to an old console TV and running it through a 6-figure sound system.

Re: Please make your products work with URLs

#309

Post by mirimir »

a1369209993 wrote: post #280
mirimir wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Funny, but with my cranky old Firefox, it loads just fine. With NoScript blocking both the site and Google. By "w/o JS" do you mean totally disabled? Or just NoScript?

FWIW, I have the same setup (3.6 forever!) and it doesn't load. Are you sure you have NoScript set to default-deny?

OK, not that old: 60.3.0esr.

And you're right, I wasn't paying attention. I did temporarily allow the site.

Re: Please make your products work with URLs

#310

Post by mirimir »

anderspitman wrote: post #220
mirimir wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Funny, but with my cranky old Firefox, it loads just fine. With NoScript blocking both the site and Google. By "w/o JS" do you mean totally disabled? Or just NoScript?

How old is your Firefox? I actually wouldn't expect it to work on old browsers, since it uses native JS modules directly.

Not that old, really: 60.3.0esr.
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