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Amazon Vega OS and Vega Developer Tools

developer.amazon.com

71–80 of 92 posts

Re: Amazon Vega OS and Vega Developer Tools

#71
post #38
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's better? I'm not in the Apple ecosystem. My key criteria would be UX and video quality. Thanks

> What's better? I've semi-recently gone down the TV platforms rabbit hole again, and my overall impression is that they're all horrible. I ended up grabbing a 6-year-old mini PC I had lying around in the basement and a >10-year-old TV that my father-in-law was going to throw away, as well as a Logitech y-10 air mouse [1] that I am lucky enough to have bought way back in the day. I put desktop Linux on the PC with KD…

> I actually like TVs as a hardware concept, and am a happy paying customer of several VOD platforms, so I would seem to be the perfect customer for all these sticks and mini boxes and smart TV thingamajigs. But the UX is just so horrible. Everything about them screams, “We hate our customers”.

These things just spam analytics and ad requests 24/7 too. The only one that's tolerable (and quite good) is Apple TV.

Re: Amazon Vega OS and Vega Developer Tools

#72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The delta in power between Apple TVs and most other streaming boxes/dongles is absurd. Even the now ancient 2017 Apple TV 4K has the muscle to brute force decode a lot of video that isn’t natively hardware accelerated, meanwhile there’s piles of brand new boxes/dongles that are hopelessly weak and don’t have a prayer of being able to handle the same files. The gap is more like a canyon if comparing against the curren…

It's incredible how consistently bad Set Top Box (and now some embedded-in-tv) products have been, going all the way back to the 90s. It's like every one of these STB manufacturers follows the same playbook: 1. Cut hardware performance down to the absolute bare minimum required to decode some insufficiently selected, average quality video. 2. Make interaction with a remote control as laggy and painful as possible, wh…

To make matters worse, the old style set top boxes didn't even have any power management, making them electricity hogs and space heaters despite being so pathetically weak. At least the modern ARM/Android borderline-manufactured-ewaste-TV-product can idle with reasonably low power usage, but the bar is so low it's underground.

Re: Amazon Vega OS and Vega Developer Tools

#73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apparently the only redeeming quality for FireTV Sticks is the ease of piracy. Easily flashed with Kodi or whatever with all the pirate streams pre-configured. I had a FireTV Stick once and never again, their OS is some franken-android monstrosity.

I had kind of hoped when I bought it, that I could put a better launcher on it without the almost-full-screen ads, which aren't always appropriate in a home with children, but they've blocked the ability to change the default launcher; there are ways to have one launch after a short delay, but that just annoys the missus and confuses the kids when it launches just after they've started scrolling around the stock laun…

There's currently a exploit which allows for system user access. This allows disabling core FireOS features like forced updates (which intentionally break custom launchers) and also allows setting a custom launcher. It's simple and can be done with just an Android phone (or ADB).

I've set Projectivy as my launcher and now it starts directly instead of the ad-ridden Amazon launcher.

https://xdaforums.com/t/system-user-fireos7-os8-all-fire-cub...

Re: Amazon Vega OS and Vega Developer Tools

#74
post #7

I'm wondering if this is what they themselves use for developing the Prime Video app? At least on LG, it's by far the slowest, laggiest and most broken app our family sometimes use.

Vega is FireTV new OS. LG TV run webOS, which is totally different.

Re: Amazon Vega OS and Vega Developer Tools

#75
post #6

What is this Vega OS ? Is it a custom OS (custom kernel and everything) ? Is it a linux distribution? https://developer.amazon.com/docs/vega/0.21/vega-overview.ht... does not say much...

(Deleted)

This docs for FireOS, don't confuse with new Vega OS

Re: Amazon Vega OS and Vega Developer Tools

#76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't need to be in the Apple ecosystem to buy an Apple TV and only use non-Apple services. The only thing that will probably suck is the lack of things like MiraCast and Google's Casting stuff, but you could use third party AirPlay software (still free IIRC) to stream whatever you want if you want to use screen mirroring. These days people tend to use their media boxes as App Launchers for other services anyway,…

Yeah, the Apple TV would be my suggestion as well even if it's your only Apple device. Other than streaming service apps (Netflix, Hulu, etc...) I think the only app I've installed is Tailscale. It's a great device that is slightly more privacy respecting than similar devices from Roku or Smart TV manufacturers. I've never owned a Mac before but now I'm thinking about getting one just so I can write software to run o…

As a tip: the VLC app for Apple TV is incredibly useful. It can play video files (in essentially any format) from local network shares.

Re: Amazon Vega OS and Vega Developer Tools

#77
post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not the tech for the most part... it's how Amazon is using it. For comparison, Netflix uses React and React-Native as does Facebook and their apps perform pretty well.

> It's not the tech for the most part... it's how Amazon is using it Yeah, so I mean if Amazon then developers their own framework + OS on top of React Native, how well do we think that'll go, if they're unable to use things well?

If I were to guess, they aren't heavily modifying anything... it's likely a fork from Android and supporting React Native as a primary tool towards developers. I honestly doubt they've actually "done" much of anything other than branding and packaging.

Re: Amazon Vega OS and Vega Developer Tools

#78
post #23
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's better? I'm not in the Apple ecosystem. My key criteria would be UX and video quality. Thanks

I own multiple FireTVs, Google’s Android TV, and an Apple TV and for almost everything I do the AppleTV is far ahead. The only thing the FireTV had as an edge was the Xbox game streaming app which worked fine over WiFi6E. Otherwise it was absolutely ad-ridden, poor UI/UX, and Amazon’s apps suck on any platform. Since I no longer use the Xbox stuff, the stick and the older versions I have line the bottom of some drawe…

Google 4K TV with ProjectIvy, SmartTube and OnStream blows away Apple TV.

Re: Amazon Vega OS and Vega Developer Tools

#79
post #6

What is this Vega OS ? Is it a custom OS (custom kernel and everything) ? Is it a linux distribution? https://developer.amazon.com/docs/vega/0.21/vega-overview.ht... does not say much...

After skimming TFA, I came here wondering the same thing... what is it and how is it different than Android, Linux or other alternatives. I realize marketing writers think they must always lead with the usual vaguely positive puffery but it has no concrete meaning and contains no actionable information.

Re: Amazon Vega OS and Vega Developer Tools

#80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All Amazon apps are buggy and broken. The Amazon shopping app is awful, a bunch of put together web pages hanging on for dear life. Amazon optimise for sales and metrics over anything else.

I learned my lesson to not trust amazon after sagemaker, some of their core services are good and well done.

Curious about the sagemaker experience. What specifically was that broke?
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