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Comment by AnIdiotOnTheNet | Hacker News Reader

This kind of thing is why I gave up on specialized TV devices and just hooked up a Windows 10 [0] thin client with wireless M+K device, Kodi, and Chrome. I want one device to watch all the things, why is that so fucking hard for the appliance manufactures and media companies to provide? I only miss the ability to cast youtube videos.

[0] I tried things like LibreElec and other Linux-based solutions including just straight ubuntu and they always had sound issues when switching between Kodi and the browser. Yes, I did try both Pulse and ALSA. How is this still a problem in 2021?

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> I want one device to watch all the things, why is that so fucking hard for the appliance manufactures and media companies to provide?

As far as I can tell from the outside, it's because every company involved thinks that it owns the audience and thereby is in a position to sell it to any given counterparty.

Probably because those that don't act that way and take no money for pushing distribution get undercut by those that do.

I can well see Roku starting out with best intentions and then realizing that they're gonna have to play the game too if they don't wanna be priced out.

You can't really rely upon the average person shopping for a TV media player understanding the economics of content distribution. They'll get the device that looks cheap and good.

It's simple really. Lock someone into a device and you've created a moat.

Consumer friendliness and investor returns are at odds with each other on this one.

> [0] It's weird, sound is one of the few hardware things that always work on Linux (until I mess with it, but that's on me). Graphics, sleep, fingerprint readers, overclocking, I've ran into all of them, but sound just always works for me for some reason.

I'm using Kodi (running on plain Debian, no specialized distro) on my HTPC/server, with Kore on my phone and a Firefox extension to send Youtube to my TV. It's more complicated than it needs to be, but with neither Google nor Apple opening up their ecosystem enough to have an alternative, it Works For Me (TM) as best as I can make it.

I still blame hardware manufacturers for any shitty Linux support because they're the ones with the ability to fine-tune their Linux support, or at least provide an audio interface. The fact that some people are running into trouble but others aren't implies that the hardware level support is once again the reason things are broken for some users.

The technical aspects many of us would like are all there and work fine - it's the business aspects that seem to be problematic.

As the hardware or service providers get greedy, they keep trying to extract more money from the consumer.

Not saying Roku got greedy, merely saying it could happen with the hardware or the streaming services themselves.

I've done this as well, but quickly ran into a limitation that most of the major services like Netflix limit the video they send to Chrome to 720p. Defeats the point of using this for viewing videos on my big screen HD monitor, to my mind.

I don't have a great solution.

I haven't tried it, but you might be able to use Chrome via WINE to get the Widevine support Netflix requires.

Back in the day, I was able to use Android Flash plugins on x86 Linux browsers by loading them with binfmt_misc. You might be able to use binfmt_misc in a similar manner with WINE.

Sorry, to be clear, I tried this on a full fledged Windows box with all the things that Windows wants to enable TPM support and just generally make Widevine happy.

Another poster suggested Edge, I'll try that, though honestly the entire process has just taught me how little I value the streaming services anymore, so I'm not super motivated.

Oh, wow, I didn't realize that streaming via the browser was so hindered even on Windows.

But, yeah, the market has diverged so far from the Netflix streaming heyday that I just download the things I want to watch these days.

The solution is to stop fiddling with proprietary streaming whose entire purpose is to create these headaches, and just torrent the content instead.

I miss the state of streaming piracy from a few years ago, where you could just run Kodi with Exodus and have instant access to basically every movie and TV show to ever grace a screen.

I would pay good money for that service if anyone would fucking offer it! Gabe Newell nailed it long ago when he said that piracy was a service problem, but unfortunately nobody fucking listened.

Doesn't Edge have a fancy pants DRM, which combined with a (potentially backdoored) Intel and Ryzen CPU can allow better than HD Netflix ?

Yes, but still no 4K, HDR or 5.1 audio IIRC. Streaming on PCs is just inferior and at this point clearly intentionally so. I was waiting forever for "native" apps for all the streaming providers on the Windows store so I could just use my HTPC as a streaming box without sacrificing on video and audio quality, but the streaming services just don't care as they'd rather have more control over things.

> I tried things like LibreElec and other Linux-based solutions including just straight ubuntu and they always had sound issues when switching between Kodi and the browser. Yes, I did try both Pulse and ALSA. How is this still a problem in 2021?

It might be your hardware. I have a similar setup with an Ubuntu box hooked up to my TV, and I haven't had issues with sound when switching between Kodi and the browser. The last time I had issues with audio on Linux was over a decade ago.

There are USB sound cards that you can pick up for a few bucks, and it might be worth trying one out.

> It might be your hardware.

I do not wish to purchase new hardware for this trivial application. The hardware works fine in Windows, so I use Windows. I have no desire to spend the better part of a year researching and coding and convincing some kernel maintainer to merge my changes to fix the damn thing, nor do I wish to spend that time collecting logs and other debugging data for whoever maintains that driver so that they can completely ignore it.

> I only miss the ability to cast youtube videos.

I think if you spoof your user agent on your windows box you can use youtube.com/tv

How does that allow me to cast to my Kodi box running Chrome though?

You used to be able to use the tv view for chrome and then control it via other devices. Looks like they killed it.

https://9to5google.com/2019/09/16/youtube-leanback-tv-interf...

You didn't even try Pipewire!?

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