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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

#241

Post by gregmac »

tempestn wrote: post #209
gregmac wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've gone through many incarnations of HTPC's, plus tried with SageTV, Roku[1], Chromecasts, and several others... and can absolutely recommend the Nvidia Shield. It has a good 10-foot interface via Android TV (as opposed to regular Android), is kept updated, is a Google Cast target, has official apps for all the major streaming platforms, can run Plex and Kodi (for local content), and it's also possible to sideload…

That's awesome. I used to be a big fan of Sage, before they sold out / shut down. Even did the direct capture from cable boxes. I've been planning to get a Shield TV, so good to see these endorsements!

Likewise. I still have some HD300's in my basement somewhere, along with a couple Hauppauge PCI capture cards, and a Silicondust HDHomerun.

Shortly after Sage was shut down my cable company started encrypting all their channels, rendering most of my PVR setup pointless. After chasing issues with Youtube breaking API changes, I finally and begrudgingly pulled the plug on Sage. Several HTPC iterations later I feel like only now (with the Shield + Plex) do I have a comparable setup.

I did briefly play with Plex PVR with my HDHomerun and an OTA antenna, but I don't get enough channels for it to be worthwhile, and never even bothered re-installing the antenna after my roof was re-shingled last year.

Re: Please make your products work with URLs

#242

Post by zzo38computer »

droithomme wrote: post #7
jxramos wrote: post #4

HTTP is the lingua franca of the internet. When you build stuff, please make it work with simple URLs. Can't argue with that can we?

Or even alternatively "When you build stuff, please make it work with HTML."

When you build stuff, what to make it work with depend what it is, I think. HTML is not suitable for all uses, and URLs is not suitable for all uses, and PNG is not suitable for all uses, etc.

Re: Please make your products work with URLs

#243

Post by coda_ »

Spivak wrote: post #180
ryanbrunner wrote: post #73

I have a love / hate relationship with Chromecast. When it works, it works well, and it is nice to just press a button and whatever I'd like to use is up on my TV. It does feel a little magic. But even when you're using compatible tools / devices that should work together, sometimes they mysteriously don't, and there's absolutely no way to know what's going wrong. Approximately 25% of the time, my Chromecast device j…

The intermittent connectivity problem might be the result of a chatty network. mDNS is really sensitive to this and clients don’t wait very long before deciding that they got all the responses from devices. If you stick your Chromecast and your phone in their own broadcast domain I think the problem would disappear. Unfortunately it’s not a solution to whatever is spamming your network but it would tell you that that…

Any suggestions on how to determine what is causing the chatty network?

Re: Please make your products work with URLs

#244

Post by zzo38computer »

bhauer wrote: post #99

Yes, agreed. In fact, I agree so much that I just use a big monitor with a computer attached for my "living room" television consumption. It turns out computers can consume URLs pretty well.

That look like good enough, but do you have a IR receiver for the computer? If I have to touch the TV monitor itself to switch on/off it is OK (and I would prefer it this way rather than using a remote control, I think), but would like to have a remote control to pause and rewind and so on.

Re: Please make your products work with URLs

#246

Post by anderspitman »

Dunedan wrote: post #181
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…

> TL;DR it's my personal site and I'll do what I want with it. It's for fun. That's great and I hope you keep on doing that. That said I have a few comments on your actual implementation. > If you clone my blog[1] (with submodules) you should be able to host it exactly as-is from the repo. Who would want to do that? Somebody interested in running your website is probably somebody also willing to install and run a bui…

>> If you clone my blog[1] (with submodules) you should be able to host it exactly as-is from the repo.

> Who would want to do that?

Future me. Actually just today in order to publish this post I had to re-learn how I had set up my dependencies, so I switched it to submodules so it won't be a problem again.

> However if you want to optimize for subsequent page loads I suggest you do so without compromising your initial page load and completely without JavaScript by utilizing link prefetching [1] which is supported by all major browsers [2] except Safari.

Believe me, I spent a torturous amount of time trying to achieve the same results with static HTML+prefetching/preloading. First off, Safari is a huge number of users. Plus you can't include HTML from HTML, so this requires a build step (though I've been experimenting with a new tool[0] for mitigating that somewhat). Also, this doesn't allow maintaining state between navigations.

[0] https://github.com/anderspitman/tuplates

Re: Please make your products work with URLs

#247

Post by mayneack »

anderspitman wrote: post #122
mayneack wrote: post #71

There's an android/roku app that makes this fairly seamless in all the instances I've tried. It even does a good job of finding videos in a web page if you don't have a direct link. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.instantbit... http://www.webvideocaster.com/

Yup, that app got me really close. It even worked for about a minute, but I was unable to reproduce the success (that was infuriating).

Hmm, that's weird. I use it for hours at a time on most Sundays. I'm sort of surprised how well it works.

Re: Please make your products work with URLs

#248

Post by commandersaki »

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 just want a TV that lets me ssh/sftp/scp/VLC. The VLC app would be the "smart tv".

Re: Please make your products work with URLs

#249

Post by jjeaff »

jchw wrote: post #39
bagacrap wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can't you just remove the smart TV's internet access (no wifi pw, no Ethernet) and treat it as dumb? Then attach a Chromecast or whatever "smart" dongle you think has the best UI.

This is definitely one approach, but I would actually just prefer a full computer, because I do sometimes run other software that is simply not available on any dongles. One downside though is that I only have a couple HDMI ports to work with, so between a Nintendo Switch and a full desktop PC I'm already using all of the ports. Also, even though I love the NVIDIA Shield, I find it does not really integrate as well a…

Get a Sofabaton u1. Programmable universal ir and Bluetooth remote. You can map the buttons to control both at once.

Re: Please make your products work with URLs

#250

Post by zeta0134 »

jschwartzi wrote: post #142
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…

Before Youtube this was a thing, just as streaming radio was a thing before Pandora. You'd get a URL and the URL would stream radio or video instead of being a website. Obviously the protocol descriptor would be different from HTTP/HTTPS.

With JavaScript and the ability to request partial content, the protocol descriptor can also be bog-standard HTTP. The player is doing the "streaming" work at that point. Most of the existing players are far more fancy, and will try to dynamically switch to a stable quality based on the connection, but if you're streaming a small video anyway, it can be really simple.
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