Please make your products work with URLs • Hacker News Board

Re: Please make your products work with URLs

#111

Post by anderspitman » Mon, Jan 13, 2020, 9:35 PM UTC

danShumway wrote: post #50

jefftk wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rendering markdown client-side seems like a fine way to implement a web page. It's a cheap transformation, and it means you don't need any sort of server-side build process. Yes, some people choose to browse with JS disabled, but anyone who browses that way should expect that many sites won't work and will need to be manually whitelisted.

> you don't need any sort of server-side build process OP is already using a server-side build process to generate the static site. Inserting the HTML at the same time they built the site would add very little extra code to their build process, and nothing to their static hosting requirements. If nothing else, would OP consider inserting a tag in each generated index.html that linked to the raw Markdown in their Gith…

> OP is already using a server-side build process to generate the static site

The site doesn't use any build process. The gen_static script was an experiment that I didn't make it very far with. I may eventually get back to that.

Re: Please make your products work with URLs

#112

Post by chungy » Mon, Jan 13, 2020, 9:35 PM UTC

> 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.

Is that really typical? I just put a file on a USB drive, and plug it into the TV to play.

Re: Please make your products work with URLs

#113

Post by anderspitman » Mon, Jan 13, 2020, 9:36 PM UTC

kirstenbirgit wrote: post #68

droithomme wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, same here with JS. Solid black page, no content. View source indicates about half is some Google analytics boilerplate, the other half is a body consisting entirely of non-functional JS pulls. OP, where is the content stored?

I feel like Hacker News main purpose isn't a news aggregator anymore, it's turned in to a place to test the usability of your Web site with the kinds of people who run NoScript or browse with a terminal.

It does feel that way.

Re: Please make your products work with URLs

#114

Post by JohnFen » Mon, Jan 13, 2020, 9:36 PM UTC

munk-a wrote: post #92

JohnFen wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There are set top boxes But can any of them be trusted? Serious question...

Trusted with your viewing history? With a trivially regeneratable netflix password? I like keeping privacy private, but I'm having a hard time imagining what sorts of private data you are concerned with that would be going over a set top box. Or were you more worried about the STB being an attack vector into your home and other machines?

Trusted as in not reporting data about my use of the boxes or what I'm watching to anybody other than the sources of the video.

Re: Please make your products work with URLs

#115

Post by anderspitman » Mon, Jan 13, 2020, 9:36 PM UTC

mrr54 wrote: post #12

Is this rendering Markdown to HTML on the fly in my web browser? Just render the markdown to HTML once on the server and upload it for the love of God. That being said, the article is entirely correct.

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

Re: Please make your products work with URLs

#116

Post by tengbretson » Mon, Jan 13, 2020, 9:36 PM UTC

Related to what the author experienced, has anyone ever actually gotten Miracast or WiDi to work from android to a smart tv? I've tried it now on multiple different phones and televisions and it seems to me to be completely broken in all implementations. Am I missing something obvious here?

Re: Please make your products work with URLs

#117

Post by pjc50 » Mon, Jan 13, 2020, 9:37 PM UTC

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...

DLNA is slightly maddening because it's clearly supposed to be the solution, but was built by set-top-box UI people and therefore has terrible UX. Basically Chromecast exists because DLNA is too fiddly for the average user.

Re: Please make your products work with URLs

#118

Post by mbreese » Mon, Jan 13, 2020, 9:37 PM UTC

babypuncher wrote: post #64

pba wrote: post #14

Maybe this was the whole point of the author's post.. but I'm fairly certain the reason the author's use case is not easily workable is because the OEMs mentioned are deliberately discouraging the ability to play anything that is not inside some sort of DRM control. They don't want you to just be able to play any URL. Its not a technical problem, its a content management problem.

AirPlay doesn't have this design philosophy and wouldn't have given this user a problem. Unfortunately AirPlay itself is proprietary and only supported by Apple devices and some TVs.

You know, I was going to reply that the AppleTV isn't a good comparison here because they specifically wanted something that worked with URLs.

But then I thought about it, and the URL thing is a red herring. That's not what they really want -- that's an implementation detail. What they really want is the ability to play something from their local server on their TV. This is totally do-able in the Apple eco-system. The URL thing is exactly what you don't want. Who wants to type a URL into their TV using their phone as a virtual keyboard or not? (Which the AppleTV + iPhone combo does this great too...)

The best option is where you could "cast" any video/media you're watching on a phone or computer up to a TV. The AppleTV + iPhone (or Mac) combo does this great.

Re: Please make your products work with URLs

#119

Post by worble » Mon, Jan 13, 2020, 9:38 PM UTC

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…

This Christmas I finally took the time (which admittedly didn't take long; I was just lazy until now) to set up LibreElec on my pi and hook it up to my TV, and I honestly don't know how I've overlooked this for so many years.

It's a DLNA/UPNP client so I can cast anything I want from my media server on my computer to it (Bubble UPNP is a great app to control all this from my phone) and even though it doesn't have "cast" built into apps like Youtube and Twitch, they're all supported as addons so you can still get 90% of the functionality, so I can finally throw away my Chromecasts. Plus you can either use the TV's remote with HDMI-CEC out of the box, or hook up a wireless keyboard.

With another pi running TVHeadEnd that I feed my aerial into, I basically don't need any of the builtin TV software anymore, Kodi just controls it all. It's a pretty liberating feeling.

Re: Please make your products work with URLs

#120

Post by munk-a » Mon, Jan 13, 2020, 9:38 PM UTC

JohnFen wrote: post #114

munk-a wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Trusted with your viewing history? With a trivially regeneratable netflix password? I like keeping privacy private, but I'm having a hard time imagining what sorts of private data you are concerned with that would be going over a set top box. Or were you more worried about the STB being an attack vector into your home and other machines?

Trusted as in not reporting data about my use of the boxes or what I'm watching to anybody other than the sources of the video.

Almost certainly not, they're very likely collecting viewership data unless not doing that is explicitly called out. But there is some good news! Since you're watching a lot of things that are being served over the interwebs your data has likely already been entirely harvested by the provider companies anyways!