Hacker News Reader

Comment by jeffbee | Hacker News Reader

Prime video has unbelievably bad performance on LG WebOS, and it’s not the platform because Hulu, Netflix, Disney, YouTube are all fine. If this is new and makes their app work acceptably, then great!

Just checked and Prime using 90MB in my TV, while YouTube uses 214KB, so maybe I already have the wasm monstrosity.

View on HN

While app the performance is just poor on my 2019 LG OLED TV I find HDR content to be unwatchable on it, seemingly a long running problem across multiple platforms: https://www.amazonforum.com/s/question/0D54P00007HLPkoSAH/le...

HDR content is somewhat better when played through the Prime Video PS5 app, though it still seems much darker than HDR content played on the Netflix/AppleTV/HBO LGTV apps.

It's not just HDR content. I was watching a 2008 BBC drama called Little Dorrit on a Roku in 1080p streaming, no HDR because that didn't exist when it was filmed. It was super smeary, had terrible blacks, tons of obvious banding artifacts, it was really bad.

I bought the 1080p Blu-Ray version from the UK, and even my parents standing 10 feet away from our 48" 1080p TV (without me explaining the problems with the Prime version) could tell the difference after about 10 seconds.

Could possibly be an issue with the HDMI Black Level setting on the Roku's input.

It was a Roku TV, so the Roku video signal was built-in and not passed over HDMI.

Oh man I'm kind of happy to know that other people have this HDR problem too. Why don't apps and TVs just provide a simple toggle to turn it off? Why must it be automatic and non user selectable? Just give me the normal color stream!

Prime might maintain more of an asset cache than YT does.

Maybe it shouldn't?

I feel like the problems with their app are more algorithmic than in the implementation details. I once had to go edit my watchlist on amazon.com because I had added enough movies that whatever super-linear algorithm they were using simply could not comprehend my watchlist and the input watchdog timer would murder the app. And come to think of it that was when I used Prime on a Roku, so it's a cross-platform problem (yay, WASM!).

I found most LG WebOS apps to have issues of some kind. A quick Google search tells me that they finally now have an HBO Max app, but that was a major issue for the longest time for me. I got a Google stick instead.

haven't noticed any performance issues on mine (edit: relative to other apps in that ecosystem) - tho is a newer model. the UHD for in-house productions is pretty darn atrocious tho (looking at you, goliath)

edit: HDR, not UHD...tho have only noticed it predominate on their originals vs purchases.

I have an LG UHD TV model from 2020 running webOS and I haven't noticed any performance issues either with Prime Video, UHD, HDR or otherwise. I use Bluetooth speakers/earphones for audio. The sound is almost perfectly synced with the video in Prime while there is a noticeably annoying delay in the Netflix app on the same TV.

To be clear, my beef is with the browsing UI, not the playback. The playback on all these devices is handled by dedicated hardware. It's not like Amazon's app is decoding videos in a WASM VM.

Well, X-Ray is a feature in the Prime app that I like and use quite often and is very snappy. Since it's part of the UI overlay, I think it's handled by the WASM module (probably with local caching) and not by the dedicated video-decoding hardware in the TV.

I agree that the browsing UI can sometimes take an extra second or two to refresh which I don't find to be a dealbreaker since it's the video/audio playback that I care about the most.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com