Please make your products work with URLs

Please make your products work with URLs

I want to tell you about something I was unable to accomplish, after more than 30 minutes of concerted effort. I have video file hosted using a web server. The file is H.264 main-profile encoded at a reasonable bitrate (In my living room, I have a Roku "smart" TV. It has tons of apps, full internet connectivity, and is more than capable of both connecting to and playing the video file described above. But I failed to get this to happen, after much googling and trying multiple apps (both on the Roku TV and my Android phone).

The way this type of thing is usually accomplished in 2020 is to open the video on your phone, then tap a "cast" icon and tell it to send the video to your TV. What happens behind the scenes is the phone uses some protocol (Chromecast being the most common I'm aware of) to send the URL to the TV, and the TV then plays it directly, while still letting you play/pause, seek, change volume, etc from the phone. When this works, it's like magic. The YouTube app works particularly well. However, there doesn't seem to be any widely implemented standard for playing plain URLs, only walled gardens like the YouTube app. This whole thing was made much more frustrating by the fact that I knew the TV had all the requisite capabilities to do what I was attempting. The YouTube app is proof of that. There just wasn't any obvious way to find the correct app combination.

Here's the way this should work.

The Roku app for Android allows you to use your phone as a keyboard for the TV, rather than the awful physical remote UX for input. This is a great feature which I appreciate. I should be able to copy a URL from my phone (possibly obtained from scanning a QR code), paste it into the Roku Android app, and the Roku should attempt to play the file at the URL. This is clunky, awkward, and not particularly easy. But it is simple, obvious, and intuitive.

Here is my plea: when you build hardware/software, please make it support the primitive, simple case. By all means, implement the slick Chromecast-style flows. It's great when it works. But there needs to be a fallback for when it doesn't work, or when the user wants to try something slightly different. HTTP is the lingua franca of the internet. When you build stuff, please make it work with simple URLs.

Is this site heavy on ads and other malware and won't display without totally naked openness to exploits?

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 installing a virus scanner? Yeah, that’s great. It’s got a web browser at least, though that’s the only positive thing I can really say about the web browsing experience.

Can it run software? If you can find it! There’s no app ecosystem here, just the big apps it absolutely had to have to be worthy of shipping. If you want to watch Twitch.TV streams for example you are SoL. There was an unofficial Twitch app, but it was removed from the store.

I tried to set up development for Tizen. Yeah not gonna try that again. I always thought getting started with development on Android or iOS was a little cumbersome but it really doesn’t compare. Even getting into developer mode was challenging since I had trouble finding the instructions that were pertinent to my model of TV, and that was the last thing I accomplished successfully.

So I’ve got a desktop computer hooked up to my smart TV and now I am contemplating paying more for a TV so I can get one that doesn’t have any of this dumb crap on it. The only downside? You can’t really run many 10 ft versions of things, and there’s not many good casting solutions. Lame, but every time I run into a new pathological case with the TV OS and its set of subpar apps I reconsider how much it’s even worth to have fancy 10ft interfaces and smart phone integration.

(If you are looking for a casting solution for an HTPC running Windows, I tried Reflector 3 briefly and it looks pretty good. But I personally do not run Windows on my own HTPC, so I’m stuck in the dark.)

Note for OP:

The reason this breaks without Javascript is because it's rendering the Markdown clientside. That could be moved to part of the build process without increasing your hosting requirements at all.

I can see that you already have https://github.com/anderspitman/anderspitman.net/blob/master... started, so I'm assuming you know this already and that you just haven't had the time to set up rendering on build yet. It's not my intention to preach to the choir.

If you're struggling to figure out how to get this working as a SPA while still including content for non-JS users, my advice would be to include the rendered HTML in each index.html and just hide it with CSS during page load. You can still use AJAX for all of your subsequent navigation to avoid reloading the page, but if the static HTML is annotated with the correct links and content, people who request a specific URL without Javascript would still get to read.

Or you could even get fancy and skip hiding it on the initial page load, only swapping it out with AJAX for future navigation, and this would make your initial page load even faster than it currently is.