Just curious: which specific wasm VM implementation are they using?
They mentioned joining the Bytecode Alliance, so probably wasmtime.
Prime Video Uses WebAssembly
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Re: Prime Video Uses WebAssembly
#12Prime video has unbelievably bad performance on LG WebOS, and it’s not the platform because Hulu, Netflix, Disney, YouTube are all fine. If this is new and makes their app work acceptably, then great!
Just checked and Prime using 90MB in my TV, while YouTube uses 214KB, so maybe I already have the wasm monstrosity.
Re: Prime Video Uses WebAssembly
#13Earlier quoted context omitted.
Look to the future, not to the past.
I mean, Microsoft seems to be making it clear that the replacement for old-school ASP.NET formsy apps to be Blazor, which is C# you write that runs in the browser via WASM. Makes making SPAs easier if that’s your stack. https://dotnet.microsoft.com/en-us/apps/aspnet/web-apps/blaz...
I'm rewriting an MVC 5 app in Blazor as we speak. I'm "full-stack" but my JS skills are pretty low compared to C#, which I am extremely comfortable with. It is actually extremely fun to work with. Havin ability to inject a service directly into a page is amazing.
I'm hoping Blazor gets more popular. However, I will see how this project goes and if I hit any major road blocks, so my opinion my shift. So far it seems like a great option.
Re: Prime Video Uses WebAssembly
#14Prime video has unbelievably bad performance on LG WebOS, and it’s not the platform because Hulu, Netflix, Disney, YouTube are all fine. If this is new and makes their app work acceptably, then great! Just checked and Prime using 90MB in my TV, while YouTube uses 214KB, so maybe I already have the wasm monstrosity.
Prime might maintain more of an asset cache than YT does.
Re: Prime Video Uses WebAssembly
#15Language success is in large parts driven by what system adopts that language. Objective-C’s success was driven by iOS. C’s success was driven by Unix. C++’s early success was driven in large part by 90’s GUI frameworks ( MDC, OWL, Qt, etc. I think Wasm is shaping up to be huge in that you can safely run, high performance code across multiple operating systems/CPU’s. Of all the languages, I think Rust has the best WA…
On the one hand the proliferation of features such as WebGL, WebRTC, WASM, etc. greatly increases browser attack surfaces. On the other hand, it allows a single relatively constrained system to focus on for security hardening / sandboxing.
Regardless, being open standards, not obnoxiously object oriented, and better designed to interoperate with normal HTML content, the modern HTML5 ecosystem is certainly way more promising than Java applets / Flash / Silverlight.
Re: Prime Video Uses WebAssembly
#16Prime video has unbelievably bad performance on LG WebOS, and it’s not the platform because Hulu, Netflix, Disney, YouTube are all fine. If this is new and makes their app work acceptably, then great! Just checked and Prime using 90MB in my TV, while YouTube uses 214KB, so maybe I already have the wasm monstrosity.
Prime might maintain more of an asset cache than YT does.
Maybe it shouldn't?
I feel like the problems with their app are more algorithmic than in the implementation details. I once had to go edit my watchlist on amazon.com because I had added enough movies that whatever super-linear algorithm they were using simply could not comprehend my watchlist and the input watchdog timer would murder the app. And come to think of it that was when I used Prime on a Roku, so it's a cross-platform problem (yay, WASM!).
Re: Prime Video Uses WebAssembly
#17Why is this in their “science” blog?
Re: Prime Video Uses WebAssembly
#18Why don't apps like this leverage gpu hardware acceleration?
On my old tablet, Netflix runs a-ok, the media player has hardware acceleration and runs a-ok, but Amazon Prime stutters.
I haven't checked it in years, so maybe it is better now, but I am skeptical this is the case, because if the original creators of the Android app didn't think hardware accelerated video might be a nice idea, why would it be different now? This is a structural issue.
Re: Prime Video Uses WebAssembly
#19Why don't apps like this leverage gpu hardware acceleration? On my old tablet, Netflix runs a-ok, the media player has hardware acceleration and runs a-ok, but Amazon Prime stutters. I haven't checked it in years, so maybe it is better now, but I am skeptical this is the case, because if the original creators of the Android app didn't think hardware accelerated video might be a nice idea, why would it be different no…
There is a cross sectional problem between what codecs that specific hardware supports (and generally is supported by all the popular devices), how much bandwidth you have on your connection and how many different codecs the various streaming services can support and cache locally.
There are trade offs to be made.
Re: Prime Video Uses WebAssembly
#20What was the reason for web assembly versus just running rust directly on the target hardware? Is the idea that the constrained WASM environment requires less QA than if the hardware was targeted specifically by the rust compiler?