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Comment by Traubenfuchs | Hacker News Reader

But people want to watch Netflix, Amazon Prime or other stream services. Modern smart TVs have those integrated.

Haha. That's the actual best part. They have those integrated TODAY. They may not have them tomorrow. And they may not have new streaming services either.

I bought a TV 6.5 years ago that could access a bunch of services, including Hulu. Too bad for me, that's not the case anymore. Many icons are gone, including Hulu's. And Netflix wasn't part of the deal originally, because it was either not here yet or too new, and it still isn't available. I'm not holding my breath for Disney+, whenever it becomes available where I live.

Just get a Chromecast or any other streaming player device and hook it up to the TV with only HDMI. Solved- TV don't need to be able to spy on you.

Chromecasts may be the best low-key (and low-cast) gadget out there. Which probably means Google will kill it :-/

Just use my tablet, phone, or laptop to put content up on the TV. It makes for a pretty nice digital picture frame too.

luckily Chromecast seems to be an important piece of Stadia, so it should be around for a long while

Good to hear. I'm not really a gamer so I haven't followed it that closely although I know a few folks who were very involved with it early on.

The Chromecast model just seems so obviously right for users even if I can understand why the TV manufacturers don't like it.

Do you have a reason to assume that Stadia will be around for a long while?

As if you can count on Stadia being around for awhile....

I like it, but it seems very unreliable - I almost always have to disconnect and reconnect my phone to the wifi for it to work

This is not always practical. Either you lay your HDMI cable across the living room, or you have to find a spot for your laptop near the television (not always possible), and then you have to get up and walk to the laptop to change anything.

The Chromecast is a small stick that hangs off the hdmi port. It’s not really plausible for it to not fit in a room layout.

Your last point about walking up to the laptop isn't exactly true.

I've gotten creative with HTPCs doing stuff over ssh. mpv (video player) can be controlled from the shell it's launched from. I just keep a tmux session going and then I can play YouTube videos or stuff off my file server. sshfs for file server access is nice and simple. I use various other computers or my phone to connect and run commands. This also makes it easy for other people to pull up stuff. It runs on a guest account, so I don't mind telling them the password. They can search for a video on their own machine and just paste it into the shell. Since all the normal controls work, you can easily adjust volume, take screenshots, etc.

mpv also works for viewing images, so it's similarly good for showing the room a picture, local or on the web.

The only pain point is when someone really wants to pull up a website in a browser. I've used a bluetooth keyboard adapter, a steam controller, the "xmouse" android app... Things work best when I can handle them via mpv or other terminal stuff, though.

Yes because Google never spys on you...

In the laziest, most finicky way possible. Unless you have a Fire Tv or Roku TV, most smart TV 'apps' aren't worth using.

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