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Please make your products work with URLs

anderspitman.net

343 pointsapitman343 comments

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 installing a virus scanner? Yeah, that’s great. It’s got a web browser at least, though that’s the only positive thing I can really say about the web browsing experience.

Can it run software? If you can find it! There’s no app ecosystem here, just the big apps it absolutely had to have to be worthy of shipping. If you want to watch Twitch.TV streams for example you are SoL. There was an unofficial Twitch app, but it was removed from the store.

I tried to set up development for Tizen. Yeah not gonna try that again. I always thought getting started with development on Android or iOS was a little cumbersome but it really doesn’t compare. Even getting into developer mode was challenging since I had trouble finding the instructions that were pertinent to my model of TV, and that was the last thing I accomplished successfully.

So I’ve got a desktop computer hooked up to my smart TV and now I am contemplating paying more for a TV so I can get one that doesn’t have any of this dumb crap on it. The only downside? You can’t really run many 10 ft versions of things, and there’s not many good casting solutions. Lame, but every time I run into a new pathological case with the TV OS and its set of subpar apps I reconsider how much it’s even worth to have fancy 10ft interfaces and smart phone integration.

(If you are looking for a casting solution for an HTPC running Windows, I tried Reflector 3 briefly and it looks pretty good. But I personally do not run Windows on my own HTPC, so I’m stuck in the dark.)

I've long since run with the notion that if you must have Smart TV features, do it with an external box. Last time I checked the Roku devices were decent for this, but there's a bunch of alternatives, and some lovely FOSS stuff (Kodi comes to mind) that is much more privacy focused.

The TV itself is a black box of mystery, and does NOT get to go on my network. It doesn't need my wifi password, and I certainly don't want it sending screenshots of my desktop (with sensitive information) off to some advertising agency. No thank you! But far more importantly, the TV will last for years as a dumb monitor, and the external box is usually much cheaper, and can be upgraded and secured separately. This just feels like the correct model.

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 APKs. Most importantly, it "just works".

I was never able to build a HTPC that worked with all the video sources I wanted (Plex, Netflix, Youtube) and was possible to control without ever having to touch a keyboard/mouse (or resort to a janky air mouse/remote thing). With the Shield + a Logitech Harmony Hub, a single dead-simple remote controls entire setup (Shield, TV, external amp, plus a BluRay player that I never use anymore).

[1] Note: I only have a Roku 2nd Gen. The newer ones look a lot better and are probably a fine option now, but I still really like the Android TV "Home" experience a lot more.

Depending on your TV, the Shield can control the TV (volume and power) via HDMI-CEC (my decade old Sony LCD TV supports it). You have to go into settings but once setup, you can power on the TV and auto switch to the Shield HDMI connection with one button.

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!

> I've long since run with the notion that if you must have Smart TV features, do it with an external box

I'd go farther. I want everything to be external boxes. Right now I'm looking at having to get a new A/V receiver because mine cannot handle 4K video. It does all the audio stuff I need just fine.

If video switching and audio processing was handled by separate boxes, I'd just be looking at changing out the video switching box.

Now suppose that later I decide I would like to be able to control my receiver with Alexa or Google Home. As it is now that will be another "replace the whole damn receiver" moment. If it were all separate boxes, the preamps, amps, surround sound processor, and radio receiver would all be separate components, controlled by a controller box. If I decide I want Alexa, I'd just buy a new Alexa compatible controller box.

Or I decide I want to upgrade from 5 channels to 7 channels...buy a couple more amp boxes and speakers for the new channels (and might also need a new surround sound processor box).

Basically, take a block diagram of a complete full featured home theater system, and make every block in that a separate box so I can (1) just buy the boxes I need for my system, and (2) upgrade a box at a time.

That said, I doubt TV makers will ever stop primarily making Smart TVs. A Smart TV can function as the only component of a home theater system. Someone moving into their first apartment after school, say, wanting to start putting together their entertainment system can start with a Smart TV, stick it on their home internet, and then use the Netflix/Prime/Disney+/etc app on the TV to watch movies.

That Smart TV probably has a few HDMI in ports, so they can also use it with the cable box if they have cable, and with their gaming consoles.

With a dumb TV they'd need the TV, and they would need an A/V receiver, and speakers, and something to run the Netflix/etc. apps. Buying all that at once might be a budget buster for someone starting out.

By making the TVs smart, the TV makers greatly increase the chances that a TV will be the first component bought for a new home theater setup, and probably also increases the chances that that first TV will be a big screen, high resolution, high quality display model.

20 years ago, I was making the same argument about desktops vs laptops. I was also carefully selecting which stick of ram to buy. Now, the whole world buys laptops, except for gamers and linux users. I don't think non-enthusiasts want to think about that many boxes and arrows.

You could perhaps keep using your receiver with a HDMI switch and a HDMI audio extractor. Like these two: https://www.aliexpress.com/i/4000102712226.html https://www.aliexpress.com/i/32850215019.html

I support separate modules for everything, and am amused at the thought of connecting a Roku to an old console TV and running it through a 6-figure sound system.

A screen should be dumb, though I should be able to attach something smart. TVs are trying to be what they are not.

The problem is that there is nothing else to compete on. TVs are two centimeters thick and have crisp displays. I don’t give a crap about 5k or whatever. So what can they market on except price? Apps.

I used to do this with an Nvidia Shield, but I've since switched to a Roku TV (meaning TV with Roku software built in). With this setup, I have a single remote that turns the TV on/off, can play Netflix or other apps, adjusts the volume of external speakers, switch inputs, but still come back from any input when you hit home.

I could not figure out how to do this with any other combination, and this strikes me as fairly baseline usability.

My last TV set I bought, I specifically looked for a non-smart TV. Got it for a bit cheaper than the smart models and there's no bloat. Everything else is handled by either PS4 or laptop via hdmi. I am not sure it's even possible to find non-smart TVs anymore.

impossible indeed. however a recent kickstarter is trying to change this: https://ironcast.tv/

lets hope they can deliver.

I've tried Kodi and whatnot and found those sort of solutions to be confusing, slow, and not particularly confidence inspiring. I taken to just using mpv with --input-ipc-server==... --vo=gpu --gpu-context=drm. It can play anything from my NAS over NFS, or any URL that youtube-dl supports (which is most anything.) It works with youtube, twitch, vimeo, basically anything except netflix or amazon prime. And it doesn't need a new "app" or "plugin" for each, since youtube-dl is a nice piece of software.

I've had no problems with LG webOS. Media playback off usb and DLNA is flawless and supports every codec and container I've thrown at it, all the apps work well. I've had it playing 100mbit/sec H265 off network for example with no issues.

It's actually pretty hard to find a media player that supports Dolby Vision for example. No Android media box does, and as far as I know Windows support is very patchy. At least with webOS it supports all the video formats the TV supports.

Yes, having an external box can be a good idea, but some things you may want to have in the TV itself such as the picture adjustment settings. There might also be multiple inputs, and IMIDI interface which can be used to select between them and switch TV on/off and adjust volume and so on, allowing you to program other devices to control it.

Yeah I just link one of those Intel NUC boxes to my TV and do everything through a real OS

I've read of "Smart" TVs that will scan for and connect to open WiFi. That's fun. Even if you don't let the thing on your network it might still be able to ruin your television watching experience.

Worse yet, Smart TVs often brick themselves due to failed software updates. My last Sony TV did an overnight Android update, and I found it in a state where it'd show the Android boot logo and subsequently shut down. Some Google research showed that this has happened to hundreds of people (youtube videos outlining the problem, etc). Sony refused to do anything due to the TV being out of warranty, and no amount of hackery could get the TV back up and running. The end result--perfectly fine hardware being taken to an electronics recycling facility because the firmware was totally hosed. It's maddening.

> Sony refused to do anything due to the TV being out of warranty.

Interestingly, apparently in the UK (or maybe EU?) there's a defined period an appliance is required to work for, to be "fit for purpose". Note - not a warranty thing, it's a consumer goods thing.

Not living in the UK any more (thanks Brexit), so don't remember off hand the period of time though.

I believe it's at least two years and I thought it was an EU wide thing (though I used it in the UK).

I always laugh when I see something say "1 year warranty" as I know two years is required.

Similar in New Zealand, although the exact time isn't defined. The parent comment's case would almost certainly fall under the protection of the Consumer Guarantees Act[1][2] and Sony would have to fix or replace it. Of course, getting a company to actually do something can be harder than just telling them the law.

[1] https://www.consumerprotection.govt.nz/general-help/consumer...

[2] http://www.legislation.govt.nz/act/public/1993/0091/24.0/DLM...

In my experience the CGA is generally ignored until the Commerce Commission investigates. The best you could do is take them to the Disputes Tribunal (small claims court) and then the time and energy involved is probably outweighed by the replacement cost unless it's a ultra high end TV.

We have similar things in Australia. Hell our consumer protection laws are why people can get refunds on Steam

That sounds incredibly frustrating, and I can't believe Sony is able to get away with that. If it's not under warranty I can understand not replacing it for parts breaking due to wear or user error, but if it's an update the company pushed out that actively broke everyone's TV it seems cut and dry that they should fix or replace them.

No Sony TV has ever had firmware updates for long enough that the retailer wouldn't be required to replace it under the Sale of Goods Act under UK law fwiw.

This Christmas I finally took the time (which admittedly didn't take long; I was just lazy until now) to set up LibreElec on my pi and hook it up to my TV, and I honestly don't know how I've overlooked this for so many years.

It's a DLNA/UPNP client so I can cast anything I want from my media server on my computer to it (Bubble UPNP is a great app to control all this from my phone) and even though it doesn't have "cast" built into apps like Youtube and Twitch, they're all supported as addons so you can still get 90% of the functionality, so I can finally throw away my Chromecasts. Plus you can either use the TV's remote with HDMI-CEC out of the box, or hook up a wireless keyboard.

With another pi running TVHeadEnd that I feed my aerial into, I basically don't need any of the builtin TV software anymore, Kodi just controls it all. It's a pretty liberating feeling.

How have you found DLNA? I tried it briefly with the built-in PS4 client and MiniDLNA/ReadyMedia on a headless Ubuntu machine and I found it to be awful— the server side needed to be rebooted in order to discover new media in the folder, the PS4 client was clunky to use (missing obvious stuff like picking up playing a file where you left off), and iTunes instances on the same network would do weird stuff like suddenly peg the processor and burn themselves to the ground, apparently due to something in the protocol.

I haven't yet circled back, but my conclusion was to give up on it and instead pursue an end-to-end solution like Plex or Jellyfin.

The PS4 renderer is pretty bare boned, no getting around that. The newer versions of UMS support resuming and FF/RW, depending on the way the file has been encoded.

FWIW, I use a minidlna instance on a Raspberry Pi to serve my media around the house and I have never had an issue with it discovering newly downloaded media.

It currently serves around 3TB of video and audio files, and new files are added daily. I haven't restarted either the Pi or the minidlna service for many months.

I choose this option because it is a very light-weight solution with no features that I will never use (like trans-coding or metadata downloading, poster art etc).

Sounds cool. How easy is it to do what I talk about in the blog post and send it a URL from my phone?

I use Kodi, and while it probably isn't a complete replacement for Roku (Netflix doesn't work out of the box but I have to admit I haven't looked into getting it to work because it's one of the few "smart" things I let my smart TV do), it's pretty good for showing content.

There's a Firefox extension called "Send to Kodi" that I use to quickly cast Youtube videos and other videos from my PC to my Kodi. On my phone I use Kore, which can send a URL to Kodi using the standard Android share menu (hold a link, Share > Play on Kodi).

Kodi also supports UPNP so you can use one of the million available apps for that to allow some other media servers as well.

It's not perfect, but Kodi has managed to satisfy my video consumption needs quite well. I'm using an outdated version (it's running on my server which runs Debian stable) but I haven't run into problems thus far.

With Kodi it's dead easy, actually I was thinking about it while reading your post: "he should use Kodi"

I think I probably should. But I also think I shouldn't have to. This is the first time the Roku has let me down.

My standard operating procedure for TVs is:

Setup sound bar.

Connect new TV to HDMI switch.

Get the TV working with my remote.

Throw TV remote in a corner somewhere....

I don't even try to use a smart TV's internal functions anymore. They're just big monitors to me.

Don't some smart tv's scan the local wifi networks and try to find one they can connect back home through? eg no password on it.

Guessing they haven't started shipping with a dictionary to try brute forcing the most common passwords. :D

That thought had occurred to me, fortunately I don't have a guest network.

I do worry that one day someone is going to buy one of those Comcast modems that has the automatic Xfinity guest networks and it will find that ...

In my experience, those networks only work if you are a Comcast subscriber. You have to have an account to authenticate.

There would be some kind of backlash if those TVs connected to one and was able to phone home. Don't know how bad, probably on the order of the smart TV that was phoning home with the name of the contents of and flash drives you connected.

No, they don't. All evidence is that this is an urban legend.

There are set top boxes (Apple TV, Nvidia Shield, etc.) that offer a much better user experience with thriving app ecosystems and regular feature updates, if you don't want the rigamarole of trying to use desktop software in a living room.

I used to do the whole HTPC thing but having to use an actual web browser to access half my content felt obnoxious and cumbersome.

As for avoiding smart TVs, I found it pretty easy to just ignore the WebOS garbage on my LG. I don't see why I would want to pay more to get rid of a feature I haven't had to interact with since setting the device up.

Are you aware of any that support the "play this URL" use case I talk about in the blog post?

VLC for AppleTV: https://www.videolan.org/vlc/download-appletv.html

This may help

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.rabidgreml...

A Sony Android TV would - you could paste the URL into either VLC or the Internet Browser provided with the TV using the Android TV remote app on your phone, as you can paste into that.

Ah so you can just cast whatever is on VLC? That was the first thing I tried with Roku but my TV doesn't support it, and I was disappointed there wasn't any VLC companion app.

> There are set top boxes

But can any of them be trusted? Serious question...

What's your threat model?

Apple TV is a pragmatic option for the sort of person that doesn't mind the Apple Walled Garden.

Xbox One is a pragmatic option for the sort of person that doesn't mind the Xbox/Microsoft Walled Garden.

NVidia Shield and FireTV are pragmatic options for folks that prefer the more Android-ish "mostly a Walled Garden, but".

If your threat model is anything with a corporate or walled garden smell, then sure none of them can be trusted and just build your own media PC with Linux and whichever apps you feel you can trust.

I have an Apple TV and two Rokus. According to my PiHole and my UniFi controller, the Rokus (attempt) to do an awful lot of talking to domains associated with telemetry and advertising all throughout the day. My Apple TV is pretty quiet, though I do catch some ad/telemetry traffic when using individual apps.

I intend to replace the Rokus.

Trust is relative. They can certainly be trusted more than the Smart TVs because their incentives align at least marginally better with yours. They need to justify their price. The TVs are for the most part doing the minimum possible to check the "Smart" box.

Trusted with your viewing history? With a trivially regeneratable netflix password?

I like keeping privacy private, but I'm having a hard time imagining what sorts of private data you are concerned with that would be going over a set top box.

Or were you more worried about the STB being an attack vector into your home and other machines?

A while ago I just rejected the concept of smart TVs (and TVs wholesale) in my residence. Hook a projector up to a computer, have a wireless mouse floating around and either use on-screen key entry or a keyboard to interact with the browser when not just working off of pre-set sources and call it a day. If you wanted to go above and beyond I guess you could set up remote desktop and get into the system from your phone, but I have never felt the need.

The computer can be as cheap as the video quality you want to view... and a decent 1080p projector can easily be had for ~300 USD, bump up the computer to gaming specs and run your entertainment off of it and you've got a nice multi-use solution for the house... unless there is competition for resources.

TV makers should stop embedding the Smart TV features, and focus on either bundling an external box on dongle, or establish a standard for smartTV circuit board that you can replace by a third-party or pull out completely when the inevitable happens (system is unsupported/EOL, has some security flaws the manufacturer doesn't take seriously, etc. And more importantly, make the display works without such card.

Commercial grade NEC digital signage displays use the Open Pluggable Standard. You can insert a number of modules into the OPS slot, from a SDI video receiver, to a nasty Android based media player, or even a full x86 PC.

I've said it before here, but I'm getting a second hand NEC commercial display as my next TV. I've used them at work and they are excellent panels.

How would that benefit the TV manufacturers?

Unless average Joes start clamoring for that, all of the cost associated with what you're asking for wouldn't help them sell a significantly larger number of TVs.

I agree with your frustrations about smart TVs but I also like the setup I have with my TV.

I bought an LG OLED last summer (a 55" C9) and to be honest I don't hate the software (webOS) on it. However my setup is not really normal.

Firstly my TV is connected via Ethernet to my router and is restricted to only Netflix, the LG web store and my internal network.

I don't watch live TV, instead my viewing is limited to Netflix and content on my Plex server. Turns out the LG Plex app is very good. The TV supports pretty much every video and audio codec so I can do Direct Play from my Plex server. I mostly have direct Blu-ray streams extracted and remuxed into mkv files so there is no quality difference with using Plex vs. the actual Blu-ray. The rest is a mixture of H.264 and H.265 video with AAC and DTS audio in mp4 or mkv files. Everything plays perfectly with quality on par with or exceeding Netflix to give a comparison.

This setup works great for me. I only really interact with the TV OS to switch between Netflix and Plex which isn't a big deal and the picture quality of the OLED panel is incredible with 4K HDR content.

The real star of the show is Plex though which is just god damn fantastic. As everything I have is Direct Play compatible I can (and have) run the Plex server on a Raspberry Pi with a USB HDD attached and it works perfectly. Even for 80GB 4K HDR movies (direct Blu-ray remux files are large!) plays back from a Pi running openmediavault and Plex media server in Docker.

In the past I have tried a few different solutions such as a HTPC running Windows plugged directly into the TV but nothing gave me as good picture quality with the same flexibility as using the native TV apps.

In fact the Plex on a Pi setup works so well for me I set one up for my mother when I visited over the new year. She can watch any content on my Plex server as well as anything I upload to hers (as she often wants things I don't care for so don't want using up my disk space :)

If you haven't looked into Plex I highly recommend you check it out. It really does 'just work' which is so nice when you want to sit down and watch a movie without having to deal with all the adverts and junk before the movie on a Blu-ray disc.

I fear that soon we're going to need an open-source alternative to Plex. Increasingly aggressive monetization seems to be creeping into the Plex experience. I keep finding things I don't own and don't want showing up on my home screen. "Suggested movies" and "Suggested podcasts" and the like. You can prune them back but a few months later you find some other garbage you don't want.

This is a very valid complaint however I understand their need to monetise and at least you can remove that items. At least so far.

I am always open to alternatives however with everything I have tried over the years nothing has come close to how well Plex works. From the flexibility of running the server to the superb automatic content identification to the frame perfect delivery to my TV it has been flawless for me.

However I feel I should point out again that I don't use the transcoding feature so I cannot comment on how well that works.

Eh, it's gotten noticeably worse of late, almost as if their resources are going somewhere other than UX. The client as picked up a habit of hard-crashing on certain files when "Automatic" transcoding or "original" is selected instead of manually choosing a certain bitrate.

> I fear that soon we're going to need an open-source alternative to Plex.

Alternative: Emby https://emby.media/

Open-Source Alternative: Jellyfin (fork of Emby v3) https://jellyfin.org/

> no strings attached, no premium licenses or features, and no hidden agendas

Subtle. :) Anyone know the motivation for this fork / dig against Emby, other than the premium licensing?

Here's my little suggestion for all those looking for an alternative to "Smart" TVs:

https://www.amazon.com/s?k=42+inch+computer+monitor

Huh. I will admit, I always kind of dismissed monitors out of a blanket assumption that they'd be wildly expensive, but $550 for 4K support is not that bad.

Yes, it's more expensive than a smart TV, but the only reason is because smart TVs are very literally subsidized by future data collection and monetization.

Not trying to minimize that this could still be too much money for some people, but frankly, a one-time extra $250-300 to permanently escape that whole tracking situation is just a lot less than I expected.

Sure... if you want to pay twice as much as the similar sized TV.[1] I actually just buy 4k TVs and use them as computer monitors instead. As long as you research to find one that has low response times (rtings.com helps with that), it works fine.

1: https://www.vizio.com/tvs/v405g9.html

Yeah another person brought up that the cost is reduced based on the data their mining for usage.

I'd also like to point out that most of the sub-$400 Smart TVs on Amazon don't have any DisplayPorts, and the display is probably of a lower quality than something that's designed to be looked at from a couple of feet away rather than dozens of feet.

Bigger than 42", I'd just recommend a projector.

You can turn off the content detection features in most (all?) smart TVs that include it. I've turned it off on mine.

What's the main benefit of DisplayPort when most new hardware supports Hdmi 2.0, which does 4k at 60Hz?

How would you define lower quality based on viewing distance? What metrics are we going by that we might expect to be worse? There probably are some, but I can't think of any off the top of my head.

Reaponse time is the one that comes to mind, not because of viewing distance but because of different intended use cases, but I specifically account for that when looking for a TV to use as a monitor.

I also thought of using a computer monitor. Also it may help to reduce the lag (I know some people use a computer monitor for their games due to this). Also I don't need such a huge TV set, I think.

Can the monitor be removed from the stand, and hung on a wall?

Most monitors, except for the most bare-bones models, will have a standardized mounting hole pattern on the back called a "VESA mount" for which you can obtain a wall mounting bracket. It's the same way you attach a monitor to a desk-mounted arm.

I guess it depends on the monitor, but wall mounts are a pretty established standard.

As an alternative to getting a smart tv and treating it dumb, I came across this dumb tv a few weeks ago: ironcast.tv

The last time I tried to buy a decent TV, I really wanted a non-smart version. It seems that this is an impossible ask. I was even willing to pay extra. Now that I have a smart TV, I really don't understand most of what it does. Whenever I turn it on it is playing some Soccer (Futbol) station. How? I don't know. I don't have cable or an internet connection to the TV. I assume it must be getting it over the air. Can I turn it off. I don't know. I haven't found anyway to do so so far.

Tizen could be a great OS if Samsung did not lock it down and enabled building from source. It is a lot closer to Linux than Android. I use it on a watch/fitness-tracker and the whole package would be great if the development was not hamstrung by Samsung.

You need to sign packages with a certificate you get from Samsung and tie it to your device ids for sideloading. For that, you need Tizen Studio, which is a custom outdated version of eclipse, depending on outdated versions of some external libraries. I tried it in a container, which worked fine, except for the signature generation. So I ran it in a sufficiently outdated VM.

Unfortunately, this developer cert will only get you so far and for the complete API, you need a partner level cert.

If you put up with all this, there's the documentation[0]. It takes ages to load and you can't easily download the damn thing, because they pull in the content via XHR. Why, Samsung, why?

[0]: https://developer.tizen.org/development/api-references/nativ...

I've had two Samsung smart TVs, neither of which were capable of letting me share my screen from a Samsung Galaxy phone..... (well, technically, I did get it to work once or twice, but I'm very good at troubleshooting and it took me over an hour and three different apps).

>I hate smart TVs with a burning passion.

Me too! When I bought a new Samsung 32" last year, I went very, very slowly as I set it up, so as not to inadvertently connect it to the internet. I succeeded in not connecting and life is good.

Pretty sure some tv's scan the local wifi networks looking for way to call home.

Not sure if Samsung is one of the manufacturers of those though.

Yes! As I recall, a screen came up with a bunch of local wifi networks — including my own two — asking me to put in a password to connect. I was able to move on to the next screen without doing so, and I was home free.

> So I’ve got a desktop computer hooked up to my smart TV and now I am contemplating paying more for a TV so I can get one that doesn’t have any of this dumb crap on it.

Yeah, call me when you find one…

I have an nvidia shield which more than fulfills the "smart tv" needs, and I think that's probably the way it should be and stay. I love this setup and just want to disable all the smart features now. It's not like they're in the way but sometimes the tv does decide that "I see you're watching a movie. Now might be a good time to ask you to reboot for the latest software update innit?"

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.

Depends, but generally yes, for now. In the near future though you're likely to see smart TV's and similar devices with dedicated SIM cards and cellular modems that can't be disabled.

> similar devices with dedicated SIM cards and cellular modems that can't be disabled.

All such radios can be disabled, if not by removing the antenna, then by enclosing it in a faraday cage. It is chilling, though, that these things may become necessary for basic things like appliances.

It also really affects the viewing angle.

What do you mean by similar devices?

Other appliances. Set top boxes, refrigerators, washing machines, doorbells, anything someone thinks should be part of the "Internet of Things" product line they sell.

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 as I hoped via HDMI CEC. It's a bit clunky to be honest, and though it's cool I can use the TV remote over CEC, it is definitely not as good as using the Shield remote, due to latency and some weird behavioral differences. So there are also downsides like that, too...

Typically you'd buy a receiver to take all the HDMI inputs and power speakers and control which source went to the TV via a single HDMI cord. My receiver has something like 6 HDMI ports. Smart TVs have attempted to invert this relationship by accepting HDMI and splitting audio out to the receiver, but you don't have to play along.

My shield also keeps stealing focus. When I turn on the switch, the TV turns on, then the shield turns on and steals focus from the switch, and I have to go grab the tv remote and turn it back to the Switch again.

Pressing the Home button on the Switch controller automatically changes the input source to the Switch, on my TV.

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

I remember reading in another of these threads that the TV will try to connect to open networks or neighboring networks that they know the passwords to (like Xfinity). But I can't find any good source through a quick search, so this might just be HN rumors.

Keeping the comment in case anyone does have a source. If no response, let's assume rumor.

> If you want to watch Twitch.TV streams for example you are SoL. There was an unofficial Twitch app, but it was removed from the store.

I still get worked up about this. I was able to watch streams on my TV using this app and someone somewhere just decided I shouldn't be able no more. The TV has lost value with this change, to me at least.

While I agree, and know of all the evil repercussions of smart TVs, Samsung's software is terrible but LG's is pretty good, because I believe it's just WebOS from Palm Days. It's easily been my most positive "TV OS" experience yet.

That said, I wish there was a dumb TV option.

I used to write software for samsung smart tvs along with other TV OSes and games consoles.

Samsung/Tizen was one of the worst in my experience (the only thing I found more annoying was PlayStation only giving a windows sdk when the box itself is basically a BSD. Let me develop on Linux dammit!)

> I hate smart TVs with a burning passion.

Yes, me too. I have an old dumb TV, and will use that until it breaks. When that happens, I won't be buying another TV at all, since as near as I can tell, the "smart" kind will be the only kind on the market.

A few years back I bought a cheap one at a black friday sell and it is plain ol' dumb model. I feed in an HDMI from a laptop and all I use the remote for is on/off and volume.

I hate them too. So I just have a large monitor.

> You can’t really run many 10 ft versions of things ...

Huh?

My media server is in a ventilated closet, so I'm using ~15 meter HDMI, USB and audio cables. It was admittedly an expensive HDMI cable, but it seems to work well enough.

I believe they're referring to a 10 ft UI, meaning optimized for viewing from 10 feet away (bigger text, not requiring precise mouse clicks, etc).

Oh, I see -- "10ft UI".

Isn't it easy to tweak all that? It is in Debian, anyway.

I miss the days when my TV didn't need rebooted and didn't crash. I want a TV that is basically just a multiple input dumb monitor. I don't even want a tuner built in.

Pretty sure they stopped shipping ads enabled by default a while ago. Pretty sure both of the Samsung smart TVs in the house didn't have them enabled out of the box.

Never experienced those problems with Tizen but sometimes it lags like hell. After it warms up it's pretty fast; Unfortunately there's no Crunchyroll app yet.

I have a Tizen Samsung TV. It is super laggy. Like 3+ seconds to respond to a button press on the remote. I found some anti-virus options (?!) deep in the TV settings. Turning real-time anti-virus scanning off made that TV almost usable again.

Really ? Antivirus ? Jeez. Gonna try to find and disable it as well; Sometimes after you turn the tv off it turns on by itself. Probably another bug;

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

I have a dirt cheap TLC smart TV w/ Roku that works great. 55 inch for ~$250 or so.

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 a URL, because you just don't come across them in the wild. So therefore Roku didn't build that feature.

And that's 100% justifiable for a consumer product. There's no philosophical reason why a consumer product should support computational primitives like URL's or files when the use case is rare or non-existent for the target market.

I mean, if this were a command-line utility then it would be a different story... but it's not.

Author here. It's probably worth mentioning that the future I'm trying to help build[0] involves users having ownership over their own data. Passing things like capability URLs[1] around is going to be an important part of that future.

[0] https://moosedrive.io/

[1] https://www.w3.org/TR/capability-urls/

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.

It wasn't even just "a thing", it was the main way to share video on the web before youtube made flash players ubiquitous.

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.

TFA's use case is even simpler than that. It's, "Here, go fetch http://my.domain/some/mp4/file.mp4 and play it." Which was also a common way to share video once upon a time, and something that still happens on occasion. But, realistically, I am guessing that the vast majority consumers would never think of it, and may not even have the ability to set that up.

Uploading the video to YouTube is typically a much simpler way to get the job done these days, because it works off of things you likely already have and require only moderate technical skills, while setting up a server that can serve files over HTTP(s) on your home network is the kind of thing that would get your parents to start calling you a "computer whiz" in public again.

Oh sure, I remember RealPlayer used streams like rtsp:// and mms://. Man, takes me back.

But that all died out, it seems. So I get that history could have continued in that direction... but it didn't, I guess. It sure would have been interesting if it had, though.

> 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.

Here is one of many examples (look at the bottom): https://media.ccc.de/v/35c3-9462-what_the_fax

I see those all the time.

The issue is that software products support such “computational primitives” and their manipulation increasingly less. Things that were taken as granted in any computational environment - dragging and dropping pictures, copying text, seeing the file underlying a certain representation, etc. - doesn’t even work in many of today’s apps. It’s a huge step backwards in our systems, and is a big part of the reason why “no one knows how to use computers anymore”.

>> There's no philosophical reason why a consumer product should support computational primitives like URL's or files when the use case is rare or non-existent for the target market.

There are plenty of philisophical reasons to support it, you might disagree with them, but that doesn't mean they don't exist.

NVIDIA GTC-on-demand conference recordings website uses .mp4 files, which you access using direct links.

Also, more generally, while videos do tend to be embedded in web pages, some of these pages are nice enough to provide a download link for the video.

Maybe this was the whole point of the author's post.. but I'm fairly certain the reason the author's use case is not easily workable is because the OEMs mentioned are deliberately discouraging the ability to play anything that is not inside some sort of DRM control. They don't want you to just be able to play any URL. Its not a technical problem, its a content management problem.

When I first bought a Chromecast I was disappointed how much of a pain it was to play content I already had on my computer. I shouldn't have to spin up a Plex server just to get acceptable streaming capabilities.

The VideoStream chrome plugin is spectacular for this. Of all the chrome plugins I've installed over the years, this is still the only one I continue to donate towards.

https://getvideostream.com/

These days you can cast with VLC which makes this much easier.

You can do this natively with Chrome. Just go to the overflow menu in the top right > Cast... > Sources > Cast file.

AirPlay doesn't have this design philosophy and wouldn't have given this user a problem. Unfortunately AirPlay itself is proprietary and only supported by Apple devices and some TVs.

You know, I was going to reply that the AppleTV isn't a good comparison here because they specifically wanted something that worked with URLs.

But then I thought about it, and the URL thing is a red herring. That's not what they really want -- that's an implementation detail. What they really want is the ability to play something from their local server on their TV. This is totally do-able in the Apple eco-system. The URL thing is exactly what you don't want. Who wants to type a URL into their TV using their phone as a virtual keyboard or not? (Which the AppleTV + iPhone combo does this great too...)

The best option is where you could "cast" any video/media you're watching on a phone or computer up to a TV. The AppleTV + iPhone (or Mac) combo does this great.

AppleTV + iPhone + VLC iOS app will give you the URL option too. I did this to watch Terrace House Boys x Girls Next Door when I ran out of Netflix episodes.

Chromecast allows you to display any arbitrary url, no?

Also, just to understand, what does Roku get out of blocking your ability to potentially see non-DRM content? Is Neflix going to pull their app if Roku starts displaying urls?

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 just doesn't seem to exist according to my computer. Both my computer and the device have network connectivity, but there's just no ability to cast. I'm reduced to randomly restarting things in a vain hope that things will work.

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’s the problem.

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

Wireshark should help. Otherwise, it's a pretty open-ended question.

What often happens to me is my chromecast audio doesn't show up on my desktop chrome but does on my other devices and I have to reconnect my computer's wifi and restart the browser for the chromecast to appear. Really wish they have a simple "refresh" button that lets you try checking for more chromecasts.

Apple TV and VLC works exactly like that, I use it all the time.

1) I copy some URL on my phone or computer

2) I open the VLC app on my Apple TV and select the URL field

3) My phone buzzes because it recognizes an input field

4) I paste the url and press play

The nice part is that you can also use that to watch Acestream content if you run some Acestream container on your NAS / Computer exposed via a http proxy and just paste that URL into VLC on the TV.

I wrote this five years ago, and it actually made from the front page of Hacker News back then.

"We Suck At HTTP"

>"We have broken HTTP. We’ve done it for years in fits and starts, but apps have completely broken it. HTTP was a good specification which we’ve steadily whittled away."

https://gadgetopia.com/post/9236

This is a great post. Thanks for sharing.

Please make your stuff work without JavaScript.

This is a simple text-only web page (in courier new ffs) and it refuses to load with JavaScript disabled. There is no valid reason for this.

I had the same thought. From the article:

> Here is my plea: when you build hardware/software, please make it support the primitive, simple case.

Please see my explanation here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22038862

One possibility is to fix it so that there is a <noscript> block which contains a link to the Markdown source (or if the way it is set up makes that difficult, instructions for accessing it). I highly suggest doing this if you do not want to prerender it on the server. (I saw another comment which mentioned the Markdown file, and was able to read it from that.)

Done

Please render your markdown on your server and not my client. You're wasting my battery, man. Shame on you!

Quite the oversight for someone wanting TV manufacturers to lift their game huh :D

Yes, please. I was at an Airbnb in Austin last week, which had a Roku device attached to the TV. I usually bring along a Chromcast (or at least the proper adapters to get HDMI out of my laptop) when I travel, but this time I forgot.

I just wanted to play a video file I had on my laptop. I googled around, found that Roku appears to support DLNA, and tried to use Universal Media Server on my laptop. The Roku did find the media server, but kept claiming that there were no files available. Not sure if it was a video format issue (main-profile h264, ac3, and mkv are listed as supported by Roku) or something else, but at the end of the day I just couldn't get it to work, and I was bummed and frustrated.

Maybe play-this-URL functionality wouldn't've helped, but at least I would have felt more confident that it was a format issue rather than just some dumb problem with the huge DLNA tech stack.

    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.

Please make your stuff work with reader view.

Please see my explanation here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22038862

I have two standalone Rokus that are a major PITA because of this. There's no way to connect to an NFS share, SMB share, or other local storage directly from the system itself. There's no VLC app for Roku. The best you can do is use the rudimentary "Roku Media Browser" to page through a DLNA server, which means you have to set up either something like Plex (which sucks for a lot of reasons) or at least miniDLNA to access files. It's really disappointing.

I've recently installed Jellyfin and even put the Roku in "Developer Mode" so I could install the Jellyfin Roku app from GitHub. This is better because unlike Plex, it won't transcode arbitrarily, but it's far worse because the Jellyfin Roku app crashes frequently, has only basic page-based navigation ("go to page 23 for media that starts with 'T'"), and it requires running a heavy media server for no real reason. I'm still reluctantly using Plex for the time being.

When I need something that I haven't put in Plex, I fall back to the Android interface on the FireTV and use VLC to access the NAS over SMB. It still rankles that Roku won't allow an easy way to access local media.

As of at least 5-6 years ago when I was doing independent development on the Roku there have been apps/channels in the Roku channel store that can accomplish what the author is trying to do, and many for free.[1] Perhaps the author should have looked into the applications that area available?

1: https://channelstore.roku.com/browse/apps

I tried. The point of the post isn't that solutions don't exist. It's that I couldn't find one before I had to give up from time constraints.

My 70" Samsung TV is just being used as a dumb monitor. It's hooked to a small windows 7 HTPC box. I use Media Center to get my DRM cable using $1.50/month cable cards from the cable company (comcast), so don't need to rent their equipment (except the cheap cable card). I can play 100% of everything and don't have these "smart tv" issues. Skip the smart tv stuff and just use it as a dumb monitor. The TV isn't even hooked to the net. No update notifications, ads, or anything else. Everything works seamlessly with macros on a single Logitech remote that is now about 7 years old. I love this setup. I can access anything from anywhere in the house on any device and it always "just works." It has been for many years. Recently MS ditched their program guide, which sucks, but there are alternatives that make it work and hopefully live on another 10 years.

Or is it the general trend of moving away from the centralized Internet, the force of deglobalization? Instead of upholding standards and cherishing RFCs it seems that so many people and corporations are trying to invent the next protocol, the next flow, often poorly documented and proprietary. Even Linux is proud to be not Unix. I know, it has never been, but we can remember times when READMEs had lists of supported operating systems, and stuff did compile. Everyone's excited about ARMs and non-Intel stuff. I don't mind diversity, but it feels almost like celebrating fragmentation. I wonder if we are heading towards something like a pre-Internet era, with CompuServes and Prodigies, incompatible formats, with countries investing into their own future independent and incompatible architectures?

I think there's some hypocrisy on the author's part: https://anderspitman.net/txt/feed

> If your browser was redirected here, it's because you have JavaScript disabled. To navigate the text version, simply paste one of the following URLs into your browser, or the entire cURL command into your terminal. If you're looking for a specific post, check the list on the Feed page.

I think it should be possible to do this with the browser and the Chromecast protocol, since my understanding is "play a video from this URL" is the core of the protocol. Someone could build a website following https://developers.google.com/cast/docs/chrome_sender/integr... where you paste the URL of a video and are given the option to "cast" it to the TV.

This would be some work, but only one person would need to do it and then anyone could "cast" a URL.

(Disclosure: I work at Google, speaking only for myself)

Right, someone already built it :)

https://chromecast.link/

It looks like https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.rabidgreml... may be the equivalent in Android app form.

Does it work with videos? The product description mentions HTML and static image formats. Neither the description nor any of the reviews mention videos.

I guess I could just spend 99 cents and 2 minutes to find out...

> However, there doesn't seem to be any widely implemented standard for playing plain URLs, only walled gardens like the YouTube app.

I've had experience overseeing the implementation of a simple Chromecast application. It was a relatively painless process and worked pretty flawlessly with minimal code. It may not be a standard but it is totally accessible to anyone with a bit of Javascript experience.

I could imagine an evening hack session that would be a Chromecast application (maybe a browser extension) that you can paste urls into and it would play that way. Without even bothering looking, I would bet such an extension already exists in the Chrome Web Store.

There's a reason that Smart TVs (and set top boxes, and streaming sticks) usually don't allow you to load an arbitrary URL: it increases the attack surface by allowing you to load any arbitrary endpoint on the Internet. When you "cast" from an app on another device you are casting something that app understands is not a generic endpoint, but reference to an object in the app's library.

You can disagree with this reasoning. It should be possible to safely load arbitrary endpoints and not ever execute an attack embedded in it. But then it wouldn't be called an exploit, would it?

Amen to this article. Concise and right on point. My parents have a Roku streaming stick hooked up to their (relatively dumb) TV, but are not tech-savvy. A bunch of times, they've asked if I know how they can watch X, and I do. I have an HTTP URL to an HLS playlist or similar ready to go. But good luck getting it to play it if no fancy app wrapper exists.

In the end, I set them up a Plex server, which I can securely remotely drop things into. But that comes with its own fair share of ridiculous concerns.

The lack of direct video-out on modern smartphones is something I often find infuriating. Some of them support OEM smart docks, but imagine if the only way to output video on your laptop was a $250 HDMI cable. Sure you can cast, but there's enough lag to make you look slightly inept if you're pausing a presentation for a question and to make gaming impossible. Some phones support standards like DisplayLink but in addition to being unable to charge the phone it also generates a tremendous amount of heat and runs the phone's battery down.

I've got the most dumb TV in the world at home. It's about 10 years old, biggest one for sane price at the time, 50" 1080p. When I want to watch a movie - I download it onto a thumb drive and just watch it from there, plain and simple. When I want to watch a YouTube there for some cryptic reason - I connect it to notebook via HDMI cable.

I feel that I soon will have to change it for some more fancy set, like 65” 4K HDR OLED. I will make my best to dumb it down and keep using it in the same manner. And I definitely will not connect it to the internet!

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.

This is the sort of use-case that the DLNA specification was intended for. It's not quite as simple as the author might want, but it is well supported. The TV can act as a Renderer for content pushed to it, or as a Player for content pulled from a Server.

All the smart TVs I've used implement this functionality. VLC and Kodi support this too.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Living_Network_Allianc...

DLNA is slightly maddening because it's clearly supposed to be the solution, but was built by set-top-box UI people and therefore has terrible UX. Basically Chromecast exists because DLNA is too fiddly for the average user.

Any idea how to do this on a Roku TV with a video URL? Because I couldn't figure it out.

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.

While I agree with this post essentially in its entirety, it's weird that he didn't mention the most significant fact regarding his request: the Roku doesn't have a web browser, and the development environment has no hypertext primatives. To that end, there's essentially no way to browse web pages on a Roku unless you literally render the page somewhere else and serve it as an image. (!)

> However, there doesn't seem to be any widely implemented standard for playing plain URLs, only walled gardens like the YouTube app.

Actually, I think the standard is UPnP / DLNA. After setting up a UPNP server I can "cast" most things from Android by using the share button, and then choosing a UPnP app, such as Bubble UPnP. I don't know if the author's tv supports this, but many do.

Why should I have to run a separate server to play a video from URL?

Few minutes of googling found this, and few other similar thingies that send urls to chromecast just fine.

http://movies.foamsnet.com/url/

discussed at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7365256

I don't have a Chromecast. I have a Roku TV. One of the implied points of this article is that the solution I'm suggesting would work for any device as a fallback, let them implement whatever other fancy protocols they want.

> However, there doesn't seem to be any widely implemented standard for playing plain URLs, only walled gardens like the YouTube app.

But chromecast is essentially that standard you ask for, otherwise "apps" like I linked wouldn't work. Heck, as far as I know (I'm not really a Chrome user), Chrome has this functionality built-in, so you can send URLs directly from browser to a chromecast device.

As I said in the post, I'm all for these technologies. I'm just asking for a copy-paste style alternative for when they don't work.

VLC for Android (TV) can stream from URLs nicely.

Alternative solution: Build your own Roku app. Last time I checked it looked pretty easy; set up a JSON manifest file and a bit of JS on a web server that can also serve video, or something like that. I don't remember how easy it was to install your app on your own Roku but I seem to recall there was a way to do so for testing purposes.

It's not quite as easy as you're making it sound (when it is ever?) but BrightScript is indeed an option. However, there's no concept of an HTML primative so everything has to be a bit of a hack. I have faked more than a few browser-like UIs in Roku apps, and every detail has to be handled by you. Think: offset math and debouncing key events.

Related to what the author experienced, has anyone ever actually gotten Miracast or WiDi to work from android to a smart tv? I've tried it now on multiple different phones and televisions and it seems to me to be completely broken in all implementations. Am I missing something obvious here?

Anyone have a recommendation for high quality 4k dumb TVs that are truly offline? I have a media center PC I plug into my TV and don't want or need any of the "apps" or "homescreens", just give me a few inputs to HDMI cables, maybe USB slot, and I'm good.

I looked around recently, and I was surprised how many brands I had to entirely skip because of ads which could not be disabled. The best of the worst appeared to be Vizio, and after a quick Google, a previous answer from the Wirecutter agrees: https://thewirecutter.com/blog/whats-the-best-dumb-tv-withou...

RTINGS.com is pretty awesome at being able to quickly see which TVs have the more egregious data privacy practices.

Can't just you just...not connect it to the internet?

That's what I do (my Apple TV is connected to the internet). A nice side effect is that you don't get ads in the TV's home screen that way.

True, I guess I'm just worried it might hit my neighbors unsecured wifi or somerthing. I live in an apartment complex so it is tough to monitor all the connections all the time since people move in and out.

Don't think it would auto-connect to unsecured networks but could always set up an offline access point and force the TV to connect to it to be extra sure. Probably not worth the hassle though.

“Dumb TVs” essentially don't exist AAA product category; you need either a “commercial display” or a “monitor”.

I think you're right. Dell actually has a few "conference room monitors", which come close. There is a 55 inch version for $850, and a 70 inch version for $3,000. I've considered the 55 inch version, but it is just a bit small for the room I watch TV in, and I'm not sure I'm willing to shell out 3 grand for a living room TV.

I haven't kept up with the state of video streaming, so for me this raises more questions than answers:

- How inefficient is video streaming when you're downloading chunks of a compressed, static file over a flaky Internet connection?

- Was it worse before? Would it work better with QUIC or HTTP/3?

Inefficient compared to what? Fundamentally you have to shift the same N bits per second at a reasonably uniform speed regardless of how the transfer is done.

Your main enemy in this process is, as usual, middleboxes, which may be a bigger problem for the advanced protocols. This is why Apple created the bizarre but effective HLS system: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP_Live_Streaming

Inefficient compared to whatever optimized, adaptive, video-oriented protocols Netscape, YouTube, and Chromecast are using.

I'm wondering how much you lose by doing it the simple way?

I'm assuming most video streaming is done over HTTP these days, as sad as that is. But now you have me wondering if the big boys are using something different.

I saw a recommendation for it here or on Reddit recently.

You might want to try http://devtools.web.roku.com/#stream-tester-tool as a way to test specific media files and streams without having to code a full channel.

> The way this type of thing is usually accomplished in 2020 is to open the video on your phone, then tap a "cast" icon and tell it to send the video to your TV.

Is that really typical? I just put a file on a USB drive, and plug it into the TV to play.

Update: My site now has a text-only version, and it even works with just cURL:

https://anderspitman.net/17/curlable/

Thanks for all the feedback!

I don't use chrome BUT I'm sure you can cast urls directly from chrome, even from the local filesystem. A walled garden perhaps, but no need for YouTube.

warning: this page will not load without javascript

Anyways, it has been fixed with a link to the Github source to access the text in case you do not have JavaScript, so you can just use that.

Please see my explanation here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22038862

Smart TV's are trying to be walled gardens, no? I would love a tv that trivially played media from an http server.

As a workaround, can't you load the URL in Chrome and then cast the tab or load the URL in VLC and cast from that?

8 hours in and Spitman's site is still a black page, even with JS enabled.

> This site requires JavaScript to function.

drag mp4 to browser then cast it?

You can't cast arbitrary things like that except through desktop/whole screen casting, which is not at all what the author is talking about (because it sucks).

You can cast files from your computer though, right? Which is different than desktop/full screen casting.

> Here is my plea: when you build hardware/software, please make it support the primitive, simple case.

Says a webpage that is just a couple empty divs w/o JS, and, with JS, is 4 hyperlinks, a few paragraphs of text, and absolutley nothing (aside from google-analytics) that ever needed any JS in the first place, let alone 5 or 6 files' worth of it.

But, I think that conflict really speaks to the funamental issue, here: Thinking about the primitive, simple case is often, from the creator's perspective, more work than it's worth.

Please see my explanation here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22038862

Yep. Your reasoning is valid, and further illustrates my point: From your perspective, pasting a URL to some media is a really basic use case. From mine, a stripped-down browsing experience is. The common element is that, no matter how simple and straightforward we think our preferred way of doing things is, it's still not particularly interesting - and therefore not particularly worth worrying about - to someone upstream.

Such is the way of things.

It's a valid point. I added an edit to that comment to concede it.

As much as HN wants to whine about it, the truth is that Javascript is a primitive, basic, use case of the internet.

I mean, if you're going to wax lyrical about how what your making should support that basics, you should at least first make sure you're doing the same thing.

Otherwise, you're just demonstrating exactly why Roku doesn't have a way to input a URL to play media.

JS can be a highly supported tool, but it isn't itself a primitive use-case. It is an enabler of use-cases and, to OP's point, JS for the sake of loading JS isn't useful if the content of the site really didn't need it.

The very purpose of JavaScript is to be dynamic and changing. "Primitive" and "Basic" are not apt adjectives, especially when the page in question is entirely static.

How is JS related to a page with only text and hyperlinks?

Is this rendering Markdown to HTML on the fly in my web browser?

Just render the markdown to HTML once on the server and upload it for the love of God.

That being said, the article is entirely correct.

Because then when you edit the markdown you have to take an additional step.

That depends entirely on how you have your workflow set up.

Sure, it's a matter of how complicated you want your workflow to be. The way things are right now, the author can edit the markdown file directly and be done with it. It's simple and straight-forward, low-effort and low cognitive load.

I would imagine it would be possible to set up their system such that they could edit the Markdown file, and a helper process would immediately pick up that the file had been edited and re-run the local rendering to static HTML.

Please see my explanation here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22038862

IMNSHO, it would be better to fix your site rather than post "please see explanation" over and over in multiple comments. Don't you think?

Irony: blank page w/o JS, fails in Outline.com.

Well this is one way to write a web page.

  <body>
    <div id='rain-container'></div>
    <div id='root'></div>
    <script src='/deps/marked/lib/marked.js'></script>
    <script src='/deps/highlight.js/src/highlight.js'></script>

    <!-- Start preload for performance -->
    <script type='module' src='/components/core.js'></script>
    <script type='module' src='/components/tutorials.js'></script>
    <script type='module' src='/components/about.js'></script>
    <!-- End preload for performance -->

    <script type='module' src='/index.js'></script>
  </body>

It's doing, ...interesting stuff, like rendering markdown on the client, but at least all the required assets are self-served. So it works with uMatrix. Hey, that's something in 2020! 15 years ago we were complaining about the .doc files, now we have the XML based .docx files that are at the very least parseable but we lost the XML based web in between. Now every website implements their own document format which needs to be opened with the executable it sends next to the content. You can try to parse the markup bits but you'll get zero semantic content, that's for sure.

I mean, it loads fast for me. I've definitely seen much much worse. If all sites were this fast I'd be happy.

I suppose -- since I can't see anything on that page at all, I have to admit that it loads blazingly fast. But it couldn't be much worse.

Perhaps it would have been overall simpler to link directly to the page's markdown content..? :-) https://anderspitman.net/entries/16/entry.md

Not a bad idea TBH. I should configure my server so that opens in the browser instead of downloading.

Don't forget to add that specific url ( https://anderspitman.net/entries/16/entry.md ) to the noscript block instead of the nigh-useless github link.

Edit: Actually https://raw.githubusercontent.com/anderspitman/anderspitman.... works fine already; can we change the submission URL to that?

From the site: I am a data visualization software engineer.

Based on this web site, this is a definition of "software engineer" of which I was previously unaware.

Presumably, he makes _data visualization software_. For example Tableau.

Even worse, once the JS is whitelisted, the resulting page still can't be opened with the Firefox "Reader View" so it is unreadable for me (having the black background).

JS should not be needed to show five paragraphs of text. And even with the JS the resulting HTML is still unreadable.

Not defending the OP's practice of (apparently) pushing the rendering cost on each user instead of doing it once themselves in a build task, but:

FF72, uBlock Origin in medium mode, no whitelisting => site renders just fine both in normal and in reader view.

I'm not using uBlock Origin and my extension still (after the author added the broken "noscript") shows just a black screen before enabling js.

His "noscript" is also broken as it still doesn't show the darned 5 paragraphs of text. It's that hard for him, as he writes what others should do.

In what sense? Because the article is explaining some problem, and the article itself has some other unrelated problem?

> Here is my plea: when you build hardware/software, please make it support the primitive, simple case.

The OP is arguing that the primitive, simple case for this page is to not use any javascript because it's unnecessary for the core functionality of this page. The content here can be displayed simply as a few kilobytes of raw HTML.

Much like the author assumed that javascript is most primitive & simple functionality for internet users, the people who built his TV, assumed that chromecast protocol is the most primitive & simple way to send a video link to the TV.

It's a valid point, I edited my comment to concede it.

The article entirely fails to render in Chrome, with JS disabled.

It entirely fails to render in text-mode browsers (I actually make heavy use of w3m).

It entirely fails to render in https://outline.com/, which otherwise is a good way to get fucked-up JS-dependent sites to render. I consider that stage of fuckwittedness either absolutely deliberate (which it appears to be in this case based on the authors defence of their practices), or utter incompetence. These are not mutually exclusive possibilities.

The fact that the article is apparently (I've still been unable to read it) a plea for base-level compatibility is, as initially noted, arch irony.

Yeah, same here with JS. Solid black page, no content.

View source indicates about half is some Google analytics boilerplate, the other half is a body consisting entirely of non-functional JS pulls.

OP, where is the content stored?

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/anderspitman/anderspitman....

Note for OP:

The reason this breaks without Javascript is because it's rendering the Markdown clientside. That could be moved to part of the build process without increasing your hosting requirements at all.

I can see that you already have https://github.com/anderspitman/anderspitman.net/blob/master... started, so I'm assuming you know this already and that you just haven't had the time to set up rendering on build yet. It's not my intention to preach to the choir.

If you're struggling to figure out how to get this working as a SPA while still including content for non-JS users, my advice would be to include the rendered HTML in each index.html and just hide it with CSS during page load. You can still use AJAX for all of your subsequent navigation to avoid reloading the page, but if the static HTML is annotated with the correct links and content, people who request a specific URL without Javascript would still get to read.

Or you could even get fancy and skip hiding it on the initial page load, only swapping it out with AJAX for future navigation, and this would make your initial page load even faster than it currently is.

Rendering markdown client-side seems like a fine way to implement a web page. It's a cheap transformation, and it means you don't need any sort of server-side build process. Yes, some people choose to browse with JS disabled, but anyone who browses that way should expect that many sites won't work and will need to be manually whitelisted.

> Rendering markdown client-side seems like a fine way to implement a web page.

Requiring readers to execute arbitrary code in order to read content seems like a terrible way to implement a web page.

Nor is it cheap: it requires every single reader to execute the same code, burning CPU over and over and over when it could be done once for all readers, by the server.

> Yes, some people choose to browse with JS disabled, but anyone who browses that way should expect that many sites won't work and will need to be manually whitelisted.

Yes, you can require execute privileges in order to publish content, but anyone who publishes that way should expect that many people won't read what he writes.

> anyone who browses that way should expect that many sites won't work and will need to be manually whitelisted.

I never whitelist sites that don't work without JS unless the site is actually critical for some reason (doing so is too risky). I expect that this means some parts of the web effectively no longer exist for people like me, and accept that, but I wonder if the authors of these badly engineered pages really know that they're excluding people.

Please see my explanation here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22038862

I feel like Hacker News main purpose isn't a news aggregator anymore, it's turned in to a place to test the usability of your Web site with the kinds of people who run NoScript or browse with a terminal.

Off topic: reading back through your comments here, I was surprised to learn you're Danish. Your written English is completely native and natural: is this typical of Danish people? Can schools be that effective?

It does feel that way.

Meanwhile, please check https://archive.md/aGFRs

"Can’t find the server at archive.md"

Loads for me, are you sure you're not excessively blocking scripts?

I'd wager that showing 5 static paragraphs on screen should not depend on how excessively blocked are JS scripts in any given page

(Note: works for me too, with default uBlock and Pi-Hole blocklists)

uBlock Origin is the only blocker running right now. Is it evil and I should run naked? All the rest were disabled for "could not be verified and was disabled" after my last browser update.

Is this site heavy on ads and other malware and won't display without totally naked openness to exploits?

Funny, but with my cranky old Firefox, it loads just fine.

With NoScript blocking both the site and Google.

By "w/o JS" do you mean totally disabled? Or just NoScript?

How old is your Firefox? I actually wouldn't expect it to work on old browsers, since it uses native JS modules directly.

Not that old, really: 60.3.0esr.

FWIW, I have the same setup (3.6 forever!) and it doesn't load. Are you sure you have NoScript set to default-deny?

OK, not that old: 60.3.0esr.

And you're right, I wasn't paying attention. I did temporarily allow the site.

Heh. <waves cane> Damn whippersnapper! Get off my lawn! And button up that RCE vulnerablity of yours! Does your mother know what code you've been running? <grumbling> Kids these days...

And when it does load, it's white Courier on black, as if specifically designed for poor usability and accessibility.

lmao - "please make your site render properly on the server"

That's not irony

I mean it's dramatic irony if they don't realize they're breaking one web 1.0 thing while grousing about another.

Please see my explanation here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22038862

Quote "HTTP is the lingua franca of the internet. When you build stuff, please make it work with simple URLs."

Says the one who can't have a simple HTTP only site and I had to enable JS on NoScript in order to read his rant.

Looks like you're mistaking HTTP for HTML... The article makes no mention of HTML/JS.

No, this is very much an HTTP thing. When you request a resource over a URL, you should get the resource... instead with their site you get an HTML page with a bunch of javascript includes... that then retrieves content. It works, but it is opposite of what they are arguing for.

Now, this is this person's personal site... they can do what they want. But it's pretty ironic to put a rant about working with URLs on a site with a design like this that doesn't work with simple URLs.

The URL does work. I don't say anything in the post about reading what's on the other end. What you're saying would be like if I had said in the article that I should be able to give the Roku a video format it doesn't support and expect it to work. My website should work for anyone using a browser with default settings. I never claimed it was a static HTML site. It's an interactive JavaScript application.

I feel like you’re arguing for two completely orthogonal ideas. Either you get the resource with the request or you don’t.

The resource you get with your site is the same thing regardless of what the URL requested is. There is then JavaScript logic that loads more information based on the path. The content is then dynamically added to the DOM. This is how your site works, right?

In this model, you never actually get the content with an HTTP request. You get code that runs that contains/displays the content. From the HTTP point of view, the resource is the code. If you don’t execute the code, you don’t get the content.

This is a perfectly fine way to run a website. I have zero issues with this. And as you say, this ship has largely sailed.

But — what you are asking for in your post is the ability to hand a URL to a media player and have that content play. What would happen if the content site had the same setup as your site (without any special configuration like supporting YouTube URLs, etc)? What is the HTTP request returned a JavaScript wrapper around everything and not the actual video?

The Roku could very well support a video format and still not be able to play the content on such a site. And the kicker is — a web browser would probably work just fine and the user would have no idea why their URL wasn’t working on their TV.

This is why there have to be tools to extract YouTube videos to download. For sites like YouTube, the URL isn’t a simple resource locator. It’s a link to a bunch of code that needs to be run to get to the video.

What I think you’re missing is that it isn’t just the client authors who need to support URLs, but also the server authors. If you have a small local HTTP server that just sends raw files, that’s easy. But loading something like YouTube isn’t as simple as supporting HTTP requests. And there is a certain irony in publishing a post that asks for clients to support working with URLs on such a site design.

That's exactly my point. It's a website. It's meant to be consumed by browsers, so it's fine if the served resource is a SPA that renders the content lazily or whatever. The claim that SPAs somehow violate HTTP seems weird to me.

Please see my explanation here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22038862

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 personal site and I'll do what I want with it. It's for fun. The previous version of this site used a static site generator I wrote myself[0]. I switched to client-side JS rendering for several reasons.

First, having a build step creates a dependency on both the build tool and a specific action. If you clone my blog[1] (with submodules) you should be able to host it exactly as-is from the repo. No build step required. I hold a fairly extreme view[2] on dependencies.

Second, I wanted user interactions within my site to be very fast[3]. After the initial load, subsequent navigations are much faster (and consistent) than retrieving a new static HTML page. Obviously once the HTML is cached that's no longer true, but I'm optimizing for first-time visitors. Though I should give more consideration to the fact that most of you are only going to look at the one linked page.

Also, I plan to eventually add some quirky little things to the site which require maintaining state between navigations. For example, I thought it would be fun to integrate a little 2D adventure game with a character you can move around to scroll the content.

EDIT: I should also acknowledge that while I defend the use of JS on my site, I concede that supporting non-JS use cases would be far more true to supporting "the simple case" as fallback. Simply supporting browsers in the default configuration isn't a very high bar. Browsers are incredibly complicated VMs. I would actually argue that my text-heavy content should be accessible via curl, like my other[4] projects[5]. I've never tried making a site browseable with curl before. That might be a fun experiment.

EDIT2: <noscript> should be working now, with a link to the raw content on GitHub, per danShumway's suggestion (thanks Dan!).

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

[1] https://github.com/anderspitman/anderspitman.net

[2] https://anderspitman.net/11/dependencies/

[3] https://anderspitman.net/13/64-ms/

[4] https://patchbay.pub/

[5] https://emauth.io/

I think part of what people are pointing out is, if you went and asked the Roku devs why they don't support arbitrary URLs, I'm sure they would be able to give you a list of reasons as long as this if not longer.

They'd probably make the point that most user-video content is on Youtube or Vimeo, and that for most users there really isn't much need for a non-app solution.

They'd probably make the point that Roku is designed to fit a particular user, not to stream arbitrary content, that it's not trying to be a be-all-end-all streaming solution for everyone.

They'd probably make the point that a URL system wouldn't allow them to support cool app-streaming-specific features like resuming play between devices, or social features like comments, or suggested content.

And they'd probably tell you that of course they considered supporting URLs, and of course they considered the tradeoffs, and ultimately it just wasn't worth it.

I have no doubt that the number of people who want to use URLs with their TV are a minority of the market. Almost certainly not as much of a minority as people who disable JS (that's a tiny sliver of traffic that mostly just hangs out on tech forums like HN). But probably not a high enough market segment that it makes financial sense for a Roku or Chromecast to expend a lot of time adding support.

Since the entire conceit of your essay is to tell others what they should do, I'll return the favour:

Please make your site work with vanilla HTML.

A link to your Github repo head where the Markdown might ... possibly ... be unearthed ... is not that.

Yes, or plain text. I would be fine just with a link to the Markdown text.

Absolutely! A plain markdown file or even txt would be preferable to the current situation where I can't read anything.

>I'm optimizing for first-time visitors

As a first-time visitor I had a very bad experience while waiting for your JS to download and generate the content - in the meantime I was looking at a completely empty black screen.

Optimizing for first-time user experience means giving your visitors the content they came for as soon as possible, which is not what you’re doing.

Maybe I wasn't clear. I'm optimizing the performance for first time users, specifically when it comes to navigation.

EDITed to be less inflammatory.

You transfer 36K of JS on the first load. I estimate that all the entries together contain about 35K of gzipped Markdown.

Your largest entry (about dependencies) would be about 8K of gzipped HTML, and another quick estimate says that all the entries together would be about 50K of gzipped HTML.

Personal, and perhaps unkind opinion. This whole paragraph amounts to "it's my site and I can do what I want", which is not a great reason to expect one thing of others, but not yourself.

> First, having a build step creates a dependency on both the build tool and a specific action.

Instead, you push that compute off on your readers; actively harming the environment in the process. Yes, in this day and age I feel it's quite justifiable to point that out. You could render it once and be done with it, but instead you chose to have it be rendered (inefficiently) tens or hundreds of thousands of times, consuming orders of magnitude more energy and generating heat, all to "avoid a dependency". This should be, in this day and age, morally reprehensible.

I'd also point out the irony of the dependency upon javascript for static pages.

> Second, I wanted user interactions within my site to be very fast

A HTML page load from your site with a cold cache 114ms, of which 41ms is connection and TLS overhead, with a fetch time of 70ms. With all of the following requests it's up around 1s before it's rendered (and I'm on a Ryzen-powered gaming computer and fiber). A subsequent fetch of the assets to build one of your other pages is 71 ms (connection re-use means there's no connect time and no TLS time). This time is roughly the same no matter what article or page I pull up.

TL;DR: it's not making your other pages faster. It's just making your first page slower.

I agree with you about avoiding dependencies; I try to reduce dependencies myself. Many projects have a lot of dependencies, but I prefer to reduce dependences instead, I think is better.

I will write documents as plain text, and I agree with your idea to make them accessible as text is good.

I and others will write computer games and other stuff using simpler VMs than the web browser, such as Famicom and Glulx (both of which can also be implemented to work within the web browser, too). (Z-machine is also very portable; there are implementations for many computers, and I even wrote implementation of Z-machine in Glulx and in PostScript, and started (but never completed) writing one for Famicom (which has my own unusual mapper design too, with a bank size of only one byte, and mapper registers overlapping mirrors of internal RAM).)

Another thing can be, if you have a discussion forum, then I think NNTP is good (better than mailing list and web forum), although you can have mailing list and web forum with the same messages as the NNTP too. Even if the web interface requires JavaScripts to work, I would still insist that at least one thing works even without JavaScript and CSS, which is the link to the NNTP, including the message ID or newsgroup name. (It may also be used with the web forum allowing Markdown and then they appear in NNTP with "Content-type: text/markdown", which is something I have seen suggested; however, I think plain text is also fine and is my own preference.) (I also made up "Unusenet", which is a way of making newsgroup names which are not part of Usenet; all Unusenet newsgroup names begin with "un" and one or more digits and then a dot, and then the rest of the newsgroup name.) (Also, like IRC, NNTP can also be used without specialized software for it, although also like IRC, it is more convenient and work better if you do have such software, and it is not as difficult to write as the web browser software.)

Making the files accessible with curl seems good too, and the web browser is too complicated. Actually, I generally make the documents I write available as plain text instead of HTML, in order to support this (and many other uses, some of which might not be immediately known). But at least you added a <noscript> block, so I am glad you did that at least.

Firefox 72.0.1 with no blocking, just private window: still no "Reader view" can be shown.

The page which can't be shown in the "Reader view" is definitely broken for me and everybody with disabilities who depends on Reader view.

(Also, the same browser, when JS blocked by the extension: just black screen)

> 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 build tool. And even if not, if it's just about consuming the contents of your website without visiting your website, the Markdown in your git repository is accessible enough.

> Second, I wanted user interactions within my site to be very fast[3]. > [3] https://anderspitman.net/13/64-ms/

A noble goal, however the initial load time from a cold browser session was consistently between 3s and 4s for me. Probably because you got hit by HN, but looking at the network tab reveals why a statically generated page would've been way faster: Instead of loading 19 resources, you could've simply loaded 3 (HTML, CSS + Favicon). That'd have been significantly smaller and faster.

> After the initial load, subsequent navigations are much faster (and consistent) than retrieving a new static HTML page.

As already mentioned your initial page load would've been significantly faster with a statically generated page. What you do is optimize for subsequent page loads at the cost of the initial page load. I can only speak from my own experience, but I also believe this is true for most of the HN crowd: I usually end up on websites like yours, because somebody links to a specific article on it. I then read such an article and close the website right afterware. It's very rare that I look around what other content is available on such a website. So I don't know how your usual website visitors behave, but I'd assume visitors which actually visit more than 3-4 articles on your page a probably relatively rare and for such a few pages the sum of loading times would be shorter than your premature optimization.

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.

[1]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Link_prefe...

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Link_prefetching

>> 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

Static HTML publishing is a solved problem. Don’t reinvent the wheel. Don’t make me run random JS to display plaintext. Don’t justify said random JS with silly whizbang features that no one actually wants.

It has been fixed so that there is a work around now. At first it was just blank, but now there is a work around. So, you can use that.

> I'll do what I want with it.

As is your right but it's not consistent with calls for simplicity.

> <noscript> should be working now

I've always had JS enabled and your site has still not worked, then or now. Your site is not accessible or simple. Again that's your right, and I agree with you about Smart TVs. Why not start the path to fix things by making your site readible on the screen of common blokes, poor people, and the non-elite that didn't buy something in the last 2 months?

So you can't watch porn and anime?

URLs are an utter failure, normal people don't understand them, the only protocol they are ever used for is HTTP, special characters are a mess, IPv6 turns the insanity up to 11. The one other use of URLs has been tricking unwitting users into launching vulnerable applications with malicious input, because applications registering themselves for protocols was a thing once added, then never critically thought about, ever.

URLs are simply not the forward case.

URLs are used for protocols other than HTTP(S), although it is most common with HTTP(S). Other URI schemes are sometimes used where a URL is needed to make a link to something else (such as in a HTML document, or a Gopher menu item that links to something using a protocol which Gopher does not support linking to (HTTP being one of these protocols), or opening local files or other stuff in a web browser, or for some uses in RDF).

But I agree that IPv6 makes it messy. (I had my own idea which is version 10 (numbers 7, 8, 9 are unusable) which uses the same format like version 4 but with sixteen octets instead of four, and some other differences too.)

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