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Prime Video Uses WebAssembly

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Re: Prime Video Uses WebAssembly

#91

Post by imwillofficial »

staticassertion wrote: post #66
gjsman-1000 wrote: post #26

Personally, to me , whenever I read these stories about how Amazon is doing this novel use of WebAssembly, or how Uber is doing ludicrous engineering effort to keep their React-based app under 300MB for the App Store, I can't help but think: "Man, that's an awful lot of work to avoid writing a native app."

I hope native apps die. Most companies won't put in the level of effort into their engineering that the Chrome/Firefox teams do - specifically, they're not going to take security as seriously.

That… escalated quickly

Re: Prime Video Uses WebAssembly

#92

Post by jackson1442 »

sheeshkebab wrote: post #79

Now I know why Prime video app sucks on every iOS device I tried it on, including Apple TV

I've never had a problem with the functionality of Prime Video across any apple/webOS devices.

The UI, however, is easily the worst of any streaming platform. Why is a search result returned for each individual season of a TV series? Why doesn't it follow ANY of the Apple TV UI conventions?

But somehow it's more reliable than Netflix, Hulu, and HBO Max (hbo isn't that high of a bar though).

Re: Prime Video Uses WebAssembly

#93

Post by curiousgal »

And yet they can't even implement Picture-in-Picture mode on their Android app. A basic feature has been stable for years among any app that plays videos.

Not to mention that their show recommendations are the worst ever, I would be ashamed to be part of their ML team honestly. (For reference I'm an American/North African woman staying in France and all of my recommendations are for Indian action movies, literally all of them. I've never seen a single Bollywood film ever.)

Anyway this is to say, technical innovation won't undo the damage done by shitty product managers.

Re: Prime Video Uses WebAssembly

#94

Post by [deleted] »

gjsman-1000 wrote: post #26

Personally, to me , whenever I read these stories about how Amazon is doing this novel use of WebAssembly, or how Uber is doing ludicrous engineering effort to keep their React-based app under 300MB for the App Store, I can't help but think: "Man, that's an awful lot of work to avoid writing a native app."

[deleted]

Re: Prime Video Uses WebAssembly

#95

Post by BatteryMountain »

twelvechairs wrote: post #42
gjsman-1000 wrote: post #26

Personally, to me , whenever I read these stories about how Amazon is doing this novel use of WebAssembly, or how Uber is doing ludicrous engineering effort to keep their React-based app under 300MB for the App Store, I can't help but think: "Man, that's an awful lot of work to avoid writing a native app."

Writing a native app for every conceivable platform someone might want to watch Prime Video on seems an awful lot of work

No. You just build one abstraction and then use a code generator to build a client for different targets. So as long as you have good developers with an interest in code generation and that will stick around for a few years to maintain the generators, then it works out fine. Resist the temptation to create a new DSL or programming language. Pick a language with a strict compiler, good typing system and good reflection capabilities and you are good to go. Ideally you code your app/abstraction once and then then everything else gets generated automatically by some build pipeline.

Re: Prime Video Uses WebAssembly

#96

Post by snuxoll »

Sunspark wrote: post #31
shmerl wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Didn't everyone agree to align on AV1? So that should become a non issue as its adoption progresses.

What about all the older CPUs and GPUs out there that don't have hardware support for AV1?

Or even new ones, like the AMD Radeon RX 6500 XT that had the AV1 decoder chopped off the Navi die for some inexplicable reason.

Re: Prime Video Uses WebAssembly

#97

Post by coldtea »

rafale wrote: post #70
pornel wrote: post #52

The egui framework they mention is pretty neat: https://emilk.github.io/egui/ It an entirely custom toolkit, so don't expect it to have a native look and feel, but it's a GPU-first design with multiple back-ends. It can be used in native OpenGL apps too. It's an immediate-mode UI, so it's very easy to build and update even complex windows. Great choice if you want to prototype a game.

Immediate mode is such an outdated approach for a modern UI framework. It's a deal-breaker imo.

Immediate vs retained is not about "modern" vs "outdated", both are about as old as computer graphics themselves. One is better in some cases, the other in others.

In any case, the fashion (for the last ~10 years) is to consider immediate mode the modern approach, and retained mode an awkward practice of the 90s. So you can call "immediate mode" a lot, but you can't call it "outdated" when most consider it the new black...

Re: Prime Video Uses WebAssembly

#98

Post by wvenable »

rafale wrote: post #74
avgDev wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 l…

What I would really love is to see XAML-like layout in the browser. CSS is a mess I can never wrap my mind around even with the flex model. Whereas the XAML model is much simpler (a measure pass to size components, an arrange pass to lay them).

XAML's layout components are much easier than HTML/CSS but styling XAML components is way over-complicated compared to CSS.

Re: Prime Video Uses WebAssembly

#99

Post by nopenopenopeno »

dylan604 wrote: post #76
nopenopenopeno wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>For the person up thread talking about learning things, I wish I was in that position today with them rather than 20 odd years ago where everyone was in the dark Where would you start today? And what was being circumvented? Copyright protection?

DeCSS was considered a very big no no if you worked for a company that did work for content owners. Doom9 had lots of info on how to use DeCSS, and so it was flagged by lots of corps. Where would I start today? That depends on your level of interest, and what you want to do. Are you wanting to learn things to do to stay hip and cool making videos for the socials, or are you wanting to do technical things to video for…

I am interested in using video compression to improve delivery of VR and AR content over the web. But, this can mean a lot of different things! I know there is a lot of opportunity for this, I have a lot of ideas, but my knowledge of video compression and video streaming is limited. There are some companies working on this, but it’s not a singular problem or solution. I expect it will end up being many categories of solutions.

I usually like to learn about things from first principles so that I can then choose what to intentionally skip over, if that makes sense. I find the history is usually a good place to start, but it only goes so far with these more blackbox type topics like video compression.

Re: Prime Video Uses WebAssembly

#100

Post by potatoman22 »

BatteryMountain wrote: post #95
twelvechairs wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Writing a native app for every conceivable platform someone might want to watch Prime Video on seems an awful lot of work

No. You just build one abstraction and then use a code generator to build a client for different targets. So as long as you have good developers with an interest in code generation and that will stick around for a few years to maintain the generators, then it works out fine. Resist the temptation to create a new DSL or programming language. Pick a language with a strict compiler, good typing system and good reflectio…

Isn't the abstraction essentially their wasm and js libraries? And they just use a vm instead of code generator.
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