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Comment by jpxxx | Hacker News Reader

Yikes. This is a $300 product that is incapable of doing the single thing it says it does on the box. It directly competes with Google TV yet doesn't offer any integration with it. There's no official developer story, no promise of future features, no way of using it out of the box without already owning another Google product, and I don't even see an analog 3.5mm jack. Who is this for?

Meanwhile Apple Airplay is not getting remotely enough attention. It's social, it's rock solid, it's zero-configuration, it's invisible, it enables desirable real-world media sharing scenarios, and it's already on a billion devices. Google should get out their checkbook and license it before they're permanently shut out of the living room.

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What's more baffling is the lack of design:

    "If you or the friend then taps the name of a song in
    your online Google account, it starts playing 
    immediately, rather than being added to the queue as
    you’d expect. A Google rep explained to me that you’re
    not supposed to tap a song to add it to the playlist;
    you have to use a tiny pop-up menu to add it."

Who thought that this possibly was a good idea or an acceptable way to release the product?

No, it's not OK to explain that you must use a popup menu to add it. It's plain fucked up. It means that someone, all too easily, can mess up the current playlist by tapping at a song. One little movement with your finger and you just ruined the mood by cutting the tune. You can't trust shit like this. People will be afraid to open up the playlist. This strikes me as just thrown together enough to work, but not designed to actually work well, in every sense of the word.

over-reacting a little? it takes 1x to realize you just cut into someone else's song and about 10 seconds after that to figure out how to add them to the Q instead.

Multiply that by the number of party participants with Android that are also trying to add their song. And this action is a bit unintuitive, so I wouldn't be surprised to see people make the same mistake multiple times (not so much if the party is filled with HN readers, but the average Android reader definitely).

I would definitely make that mistake multiple times if I was drunk at a party. If there was a lot of crap music at the party, I might even use it as an excuse for 'accidentally' changing the music.

When I click a song in my Amazon MP3 app on Android, it starts playing; click + hold brings up a menu. Seems like there's precedent at least.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.amazon.mp3

Spotify on iPhone works this way as well. Tap a song while playing a different one, and the new song immediately starts to play. Swipe to the right and press the playlist icon and it gets added to the queue. I've messed up song requests, to the ire of friends listening.

Indeed. In my humble opinion, the correct solution for something like this is the safe one: When an item is tapped, present the choices for what to do with it.

Why not divide the background of the item and have one side play and the other add to queue?

I agree. The Logitech Squeezebox does the same thing. It's wrong. And playlists are essential but underexposed on the Squeezebox.

Speaking of Logitech, I wonder if Google collaborated with them for the Q. They did for Google TV.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-57322966-93/logitech-confes...

I'm going to guess no.

"Meanwhile Apple Airplay is not getting remotely enough attention"

Better than Airplay is DLNA.... a standard that is implemented by most modern net-connected TVs that I've seen. It still boggles my mind that I have to download an Android app to use DLNA on my Galaxy Nexus.

I have been trying to make uPNP A/V and DLNA work for years without success. From an early Philips Streamium, to an XBox 360, and now a Sony NS400--none have had acceptable results for me. Right now my biggest annoyance is that none of the iOS DLNA controller apps I can find will play music continuously without being constantly on and in the foreground. I think this traces back to the fact that DLNA renderers are stateless and have no concept of a playlist, so as soon as a song stops the controller must be waiting for the event and ready to send the command to play the next song (this also explains why I've never heard gapless playback with DLNA either). If the controller is powered off, asleep, etc. then the music stops.

BubbleUPnP Server can sort of fix this by turning a DLNA renderer into an OpenHome renderer: http://bubbleguuum.free.fr/upnpserver/

Nice! I was hoping somebody would make a remotely controlled DLNA controller to fix these issues. Just setup BubbleUPnP and it seems to work with PlugPlayer on my ipad--most importantly music actually continues even when the ipad is asleep. For some reason I don't have volume control or the ability to pause (but can stop), but at least I can listen to an album and browse the web. It's pretty sad that DLNA alone completely fails at this task.

This OpenHome is interesting, there's a lot of stuff going on here! An OS to host Web UI's for controlling a network stack... whoa, there's a lot here.

There are a lot of AV components, listed at http://openhome.org/wiki/OhMedia . Multiroom and party-mode synchronized audio are there too.

DLNA is sadly such a mess. I really wish it worked, I have my Windows 7 PC and I have my DLNA media server and I have a DLNA TV and I have a phone that does DLNA.

You'd think my home would be full of interconnected multimedia, but it just. never. works. Seriously, I would pay a big amount of money to someone who just made a series of DLNA products that implemented the standard in meaning not just lip service.

Weird. I've had great success with DLNA and my Samsung TV. I had an HTC Thunderbolt and it was ridiculously seamless to play stuff on the TV. The Nexus, not so much.

Either way -- if the Q had been DLNA, wouldn't that have been better than what it's trying to do now?

Edit: more better english

The original nexus one dock used a proprietary protocol over Bluetooth.

My bet is that Google will pull a betamax on the Google TV ecosystem

I believe the protocol over bluetooth was standard A2DP, but it required a serial protocol to pair the device.

Yeah. I may be thinking of the 1wire connection...

Anyway, not myself not other modder were able to use it effectively with any other device unless gutted.

foobar2000 + foo_upnp, BubbleUPnP on Android, XBMC, and PS3 Media Server have all worked fantastically for me in the past. Windows Media Player and my TV's built-in UPnP support, not so much.

As an enthusiast, I agree, DLNA is a good idea with many real-world working implementations. But it's also been out in some capacity for just about a decade while garnering no real tech cachet, no real customer awareness, comes with a meaningless acronym for a brand name, doesn't work out of the box in too many situations, and has no standard UI. The threshhold for user frustration is incredibly low for successful consumer gear and getting lower.

Airplay works out of the box every time, with minimal training, no setup, and no discovery drama. One concept, one button, one set of expected results.

True, though if I were the "music czar" at Apple, I'd integrate Remote.app into Music on iOS (preferably replacing the Music interface with Remote's, at least on iPad, though admittedly this is a matter of taste) and add Remote client support to iTunes on the desktop.

My mom still has trouble understanding the difference between playing music on Mac iTunes via Remote from her iPod touch, and playing the same music, through the same AirPlay speakers, from the same(ish) library, via iTunes Match, and in principle, she shouldn't have to (this is admittedly tricky to get right for corner cases, but in the common scenario where desktops running iTunes never vanish and all songs are assumed to be in iTunes Match, there should be some simple logic to optimize the mechanism given only "song" and "speakers", to avoid stuffing an iDevice with music from Match and draining its battery when all the music required is already available locally on a Mac running iTunes or even via iTunes Match from an AC-powered device like Apple TV).

DLNA is useless. Or at least every implementation I have seen is. Far too little control over how the media is structured (menus, cover sheets etc.); no support for serving up formats like DVD VOB's or ISO images etc. I kept looking for solutions for my home media setup on the assumption that surely since it's specifically designed for media serving, it ought to do it better than having my set top box talk to my Samba server, but no.

Holy balls, it does so less and costs $300? It's cheaper to buy an old unlocked Android phone on ebay and an HDMI cable at that cost. You get a lot more features that way.

Also, at 300 bucks, honestly it's going to be much cheaper to set up a raspberry pi or its equivalent with some hybrid franken-software setup. Add a few batch files on watch folders for video format conversion and I think you're good to go.

Buy a roku for $50, and use Plex. On the fly automatic transcoding and folder watching, no mess no fuss.

Roku is the way to go, unless you want the Airplay features in your living room also - then get the AppleTV but you'll need to jailbreak it to install Plex. Worth it tho.

Or buy a Boxee Box for $199, it basically runs easy to use version of XBMC plus supports airplay.

So does the Apple TV, for half the price.

Apples and Oranges. An Apple TV can't do 1080p.

Third generation actually does 1080p (http://www.apple.com/appletv/)

It doesn't play mkv or avi files.

You can install XBMC on it, just like a Boxee box.

I wish Plex on the Roku just turned my TV/Receiver/etc into a dumb yet high-quality media player. I don't want to use the awful Roku remote with a 10 foot interface -- I'm happy to use my laptop or phone as the control module and have the TV be little more than a digital "projection screen".

I use the Harmony One remote to control my whole setup, including Roku. It's not cheap, and it's a PITA to program (have to tether it to a computer to do it), but it works like a charm.

http://www.logitech.com/en-us/remotes/universal-remotes/harm...

I picked up an Android 4 7" tablet with 1GB RAM and 16GB flash and 2160P output over HDMI for 105GBP (~165 USD) a couple of weeks ago on Amazon. It came pre-rooted too. (The main reason it's so cheap: 800x480 display that's decidedly lower end than my HTC Desire HD, and obviously the CPU isn't going to set any world records, but all video playback I've thrown at it so far has worked decently).

2160p? Which tablet is this?

Also iirc, the Samsung Galaxy S2 tablet versions (i.e. identical to S2 but without the phone) cost around $200 bucks, and that can play any format you throw at it. Plus since it's DLNA capable you could directly stream content off your home server without breaking a sweat. The CPU/GPU are pretty capable being the Cortex A9/Mali 400 combo.

I think it's an integrated feature of at least some of the chipsets incorporating the Mali 400 GPU.

The tablet I got is a NatPC 009S. Also sold as Tabtronic and probably a bunch of other names. It's a nice little thing for it's price. As mentioned, where they've skimped the most is clearly the screen, which doesn't measure up favourably to mid/high end Android phones, and much less to the high end tablets.

Note that I've not tested 2160p output, though, as I don't have anything that can display it, and given the marketing copy on some of these sites who knows, but that's what they claim anyway.

Could they licence it? As in, would Apple give them a licence?

The main reason I have no interest in Airplay is that it requires iTunes, and none of my media 'workflow' involves it, not to mention it being a horrible piece of software.

It is true that PCs only have the one workflow: airplay audio out of iTunes. And iTunes is a raging piece of shit.

But it is basically a system service on iOS, which does not require iTunes. And with the next release of the Mac OS, display mirroring will be built in - how hard would it be to implement it in iTunes for windows and short-circuit Microsoft's Play-To and DNLA services?

Every platform vendor needs this device-spanning mortar now. And Google doesn't have it.

Microsoft's Play To is DLNA: http://digitalmediaphile.com/index.php/category/dlna/

Apologies! I stand corrected.

I recommend "Airfoil" [1] which lets you stream to airplay devices from any app on your system. It makes my airport express way more useful.

[1] http://www.rogueamoeba.com/airfoil/

You don't need iTunes if you are controlling Apple TV with an iOS device. In fact I'd think that's the common usage.

Apple's Airplay is on a billion devices? There are 365 million iOS devices. Also, don't you need an Apple TV to stream the media to your TV? You're saying you need an Android device to stream to the Q, but you need an Apple TV device to stream to your TV, so it's kind of the same thing.

"There are 365 million iOS devices."

Can AirPlay from Android devices as well...

http://gizmodo.com/5883721/the-top-7-android-music-apps-for-...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperbole

I don't know if it justifies the "billion" that the other commenter threw out there, but there are a ton of Airport Express wifi devices, which support Airtunes. That's obviously not exactly the same thing, but saying that there are only 0.4 billion devices instead of 1 billion doesn't seem like a particularly strong argument.

Can you clarify how you think needing a separate Android device to control a Q to stream to a TV is the same as needing an Apple TV to stream to a TV? An Apple TV comes with a basic remote, so you don't need anything other than what comes in the box to actually use the device.

My personal gripe with the entire world of streamers: neither the Q or the Apple TV do anything out of the box - you first need to hunt down a HDMI cable.

That alone throws half the customer base into a frustrating situation, incurring a knock-on $30 expense.

Even Roku doesn't offer this courtesy, although they do upsell an inexpensive cable during checkout.

Fine with me. I can get a higher quality cable for cheaper than they would charge to pack it in, plus electronics retailers have an incentive to stock it at shitty margins for the upsell opportunity on the cable.

Everyone wins, except lazy or ignorant consumers, and they always lose so who cares.

I was counting both Macs and Windows PCs with iTunes installed. iTunes can pack up both audio and video and airplay it over to a receiver. "device" was a poor choice of words, apologies.

There are a lot of devices and software packages that receive AirPlay streams now; for example I stream to XBMC on a Linux machine - works like a charm.

I agree. I saw some of the videos from WWDC and AirPlay was basically doing what the Wii U is proposing to do: multi player, split views, augmented display or mirroring. I didn't realise it was so flexible.

AirPlay remains uninteresting as long as it is simply a streamer. I can't use it as a remote because it will kill my batteries. It should instead send the protocol/uri of the content and let the player be responsible for retrieving it.

I'm pretty sure Airplay does exactly what you're talking about. If you play a video from YouTube or even streamed off your computer via airvideo, the apple tv connects to the server directly and the iPad or iPhone just acts as a remote. It doesn't use battery or network.

It's just seamless and you don't need to know how it works to use it.

I disagree. Not knowing how it works makes me not want to use it.

I don't know if you're right or not, but certainly YouTube and desktop iTunes is only a subset of AirPlay content. This doesn't really scale without providing a spec for content to follow.

Lucky for us, Apple has provided one: http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-pantos-http-live-streaming-...

All iOS apps must use HLS for videos longer than 10 minutes and Apple verifies compliance during the app store review process. As mentioned, with AirPlay all HLS media files are downloaded directly by the AppleTV, not piped through your device. I can tell you from experience it works very well.

I just performed this test and it didn't work the way you describe:

1) Found a video on iPad YouTube. Longer than 10 minutes. 2) Played it to the TV with AirPlay. 3) Turned the iPad off.

Expected the video to continue to play but it stopped immediately.

Can you get a similar test to work?

I'd guess your ipad has to stay connected anyway, not for the data streaming but to control the video ?

You can put the iPad to sleep and it will continue to play the video on the AppleTV, but my guess is that if you turn it completely off or move it outside of wifi range you'll lose the control connection so the video will stop playing.

Want to use it as a remote? Then use the remote app. Works fine and you can tell the remote iTunes library to use the airplay output from inside the remote app. Complaint solved! ;)

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