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Comment by crazygringo | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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