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Comment by konschubert | Hacker News Reader

It's incredible how bad the video player is on disney plus. Apparently this is much harder to get right than I thought.

In my experience Youtube and Netflix are the only apps that really got the basics of video streaming right.

Really I would say the exact opposite, at least with regard to YouTube. Their Apple TV app is genuinely the only bad Apple TV app I've ever used. Constant problems with audio de-sync, random freezes and blank screens. By comparison I don't remember the last time any of the others I use (infuse, Max, D+, Prime) have had any issues at all.

Agreed with Apple TV app. YouTube likes to set my video quality to 480p by default. When I manually change it to 1080p for a video, it turns my 1.5x playback speed to normal. Finally, it will desync my audio if I change it back to 1.5x.

I’ve gone through this process 1000 times over the last year. It’s become muscle memory on my remote. YouTube still hasn’t fixed it.

Seconding the constant downgrading of quality to 480p.

amen.

one of the worst apps on apple tv. it got to the point i don’t even try to like videos. or rewind them. or do anything while they are playing lest i cause a restart. buffering. a random video to start playing, etc.

I don’t doubt it obviously, but I wonder what triggers it as I’ve never experienced any of these personally on the Apple TV app. I got other reasons I dislike it, but many of them stem from YouTube itself being more terrible than ever.

And pornhub, unironically

Max is the one I hate the most. I watch most streaming content on an Android TV; on Max, you can only go forward or back 10 seconds at a time, and holding the button does nothing.

I often fall asleep watching things, and so want to skip to near the end of an episode to see what I remember. 30 minutes is 180 individual clicks on the remote.

Holding the button fast forwards, you just have to hold it longer than one would reasonably think to hold it (well, or something is plain broken for you specifically). Doesn't much matter though since FF is capped at a low enough speed you're better off clicking a ton.

Huh, I feel like I've tried holding it for an unreasonable amount of time. I'll try harder!

Though I generally just resort to switching to Hulu to watch it there. Why I don't start with Hulu is one of the great mysteries of life.

The insane one to me is how bad some platforms are at simply remembering which episode of a show you're on. Hulu and Prime are the worst offenders. You finish an episode and even start the next, but later, it will show you at the finished episode with 2 minutes left. It's maddening.

And when I had hulu on Apple TV often I wouldn’t be able to find partially watched series except via the search feature. Mind boggling.

I was recently abroad. Started watching a show on Prime. Would come back and get some issues as you describe but overall it worked.

Came back home to find that Prime has now no idea I even started watching that show. Had to binary search episodes until I found where I had stopped.

I was thinking about this recently as well. People generally underestimate the engineering effort and infrastructure needed to achieve what Netflix has which is essentially that it offers a smooth, fast video player on all nearly every platform, including my toaster. You realize how (apparently) difficult this is especially when it comes to fast forward and rewind. This is a mostly seamless experience on Netflix (and YouTube as well), but extremely janky and frustrating on Prime Video as well as Disney+. Getting to the precise spot you want on Netflix (and YT) is easy both on mobile as well as when using a remote on TV, which is typically a pretty awful experience. I get super frustrated when trying to fast forward and rewind NBA League Pass on Prime, though I wonder how much of this has to do with them doing less caching and/or still image grabbing for less watched things? All I know is that I wish I could have this subscription on Netflix and have considered moving it over to YouTube TV.

The video player in e.g. Infuse is better than all of the streaming service ones I've tried. Infuse is good but I doubt they are special as much as just in a position to care about the quality of the player instead of IP.

Their videos look much better than netflix though.

Them and HBO Max both were both terrible in my experience on Roku.

Hard to get right or are they simply complacent?

My high seas setup can reliably stream movies that are easily 5x the bitrate of any streaming service, without a hitch.

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