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Amazon Vega OS and Vega Developer Tools
81–90 of 92 posts
Re: Amazon Vega OS and Vega Developer Tools
#82Earlier quoted context omitted.
What's better? I'm not in the Apple ecosystem. My key criteria would be UX and video quality. Thanks
"Google TV Streamer" is Googles official one, it's very streaming focused, any Android TV device of a reputable brand is good. NVIDIA Shields being the best. I can recommend the app "Stremio" which has an extensive add-on ecosystem you can explore, works on Android, Android TV, Linux, MacOS and Windows!
Isn't the Nvidia shield the thing they added ads to way after they were sold?
Re: Amazon Vega OS and Vega Developer Tools
#83Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I use Plex for that and it works great.
I'm going to check out VLC though. Thanks for the tip.
One other app that I had and forgot about is some remote play client for Steam. I start Steam on my desktop PC then pair my PS5 remote to the Apple TV, start the Steam tvOS app, and I can play games from my PC on the Apple TV.
Re: Amazon Vega OS and Vega Developer Tools
#84Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
Fire OS was an Android fork. Best I can tell from the stuff I've seen in the news about it, is that Vega OS is not Android at all, and is completely custom (well minus the Linux kernel)
Re: Amazon Vega OS and Vega Developer Tools
#85Amazon rolling their own OS for TV add-on devices instead of the re-skinned Android TV OS they've been using until now basically means I won't consider their devices any more. The last thing I need is yet another non-standard moving target to support in my house. Which is unfortunate because I bought their catchily-named "Fire TV Stick 4k Max (2nd Gen)" and, once you de-cruft the advertising riddled OS and sideload standard Android TV apps (eg SmartTube, Plex), the hardware is decent at a fair price (~$50). IMHO, all the broadly available TV streaming devices from major manufacturers are under-powered but the more recent, higher-end ones like the Fire TV 4K Max and Google Chromecast (aka "4K Streamer") can be basically usable once de-crufted.
Unfortunately, the only more powerful alternatives are from offshore manufacturers and thus have spotty Android TV support and may not be "authorized" (ie whitelisted) by all encrypted streaming apps (Netflix, Amazon, Disney+, etc). It's bizarre that the most powerful dedicated TV streaming device available today is by far still the NVidia Shield which is essentially a 2015 era design (it got a very minor refresh in 2019 https://androidtvnews.com/nvidia-shield-differences/). It sucks because there are a lot of useful things a TV streaming device could do if it had a little more CPU/GPU headroom (AI upscaling, de-mosaicing, casual and retro-gaming).
Re: Amazon Vega OS and Vega Developer Tools
#86I find Amazon’s software for streaming much slower and buggier than other providers. The streams too also seem to have more issues.
I'm not a software engineer, but it simply blows my mind how shitty most of the streaming apps are. Is it really that hard to serve videos? How is Netflix so good at it? I guess apple tv is pretty snappy too. Surely there's not some deep hidden technical secret that others can't figure out, at least these days. I know back in the day auto-scaling and such was high tech, but isn't it standard technology now? Is it simply that they don't want to spend money to get good engineers? Poor management? It seems like serving videos to people smoothly should be a solved problem. And that's not even the only thing they suck at, the navigation within the apps suck. Or fast-forward/rewind functionality - some of them only have one speed or can only increment 30 seconds at a time. Or why can't I reset a show easily if I want to rewatch it? These are all doable things.
Ignoring the missing functionality, I can see one possibility being that the TV's built in computer is just too weak to process video? Would I better off buying a mini-PC to run all of the services off of?
But what seems like the most obvious explanation is that they know they can get by with it because they have exclusive rights to whatever show you're trying to watch.
Re: Amazon Vega OS and Vega Developer Tools
#87Earlier 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…
What kind of ads inappropriate for children were shown by it?
Re: Amazon Vega OS and Vega Developer Tools
#88Earlier 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…
Does it actually work well? I tried something similar and quit in disgust after realizing hdr 4k requires terrible hoops to go through
Re: Amazon Vega OS and Vega Developer Tools
#89What 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...
And if it runs APKs from the Amazon Appstore on non-Android Linux, what tech are they using to do it?
Re: Amazon Vega OS and Vega Developer Tools
#90What 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...
And if it runs APKs from the Amazon Appstore on non-Android Linux, what tech are they using to do it?
I don't think it runs APKs. They'd probably market that feature more prominently if it were the case. They have their own format called VPKG.
https://developer.amazon.com/docs/vega/0.21/app-submission.h... "You must have a VPKG file available as an app binary."