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Comment by DanovonT | Hacker News Reader

I always found most tv apps have some performance issues. I've seen netflix, prime, even youtube crash, lag, or have some issues now and then that just made me think that maybe tvs are just not powerful. Don't even want to talk about Disney+, HBO, or Hulu.

Then I got an appletv+ subscription, and was pleasantly surprised it performed far better, on an android tv even. I wonder if it's beyond just the company standards for performance, and that the lower compatibility for porting between swift and the android sdks compared to idk react components or flutter, forced them to start from scratch for performance on android tvs.

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TVs are NOT powerful. It’s like writing software for the Lunar rover.

Even the slower ones are more like a Wii U, which is perfectly capable of everything a set-top box needs to do. Really, the hardware acceleration does all of the heavy lifting, and the processor only needs to render text and coordinate what to composite.

It's the bloat of the software layer on top that's slowing things down.

A 1st-generation Chromecast only has 512 MB pf RAM and a dual-core 1.2 GHz processor, and it can handle video streaming just fine. Building an interface on top of that doesn't take a lot of resources, if the underlying layers aren't bloated. With current Android/iOS development, they very much are.

My 2 cents: if you are big enough and the competition isn't as strong, users will give you a pass on some performance issues as long as they get the content they want.

TV's are optimized around decoding video, At least they can generally do this at full speed, this is coupled with the cheapest cpu the manufacturer can find. Even this would be manageable, There have been great UI's on weaker hardware. But then they want to program everything in html/javascript/css 7 layer lasagna stacks, this is where things start to get bad. Then the marketing team gets their slimy hands in and proceed to stuff the telemetry in until full. It is still "technically" usable, but nobody is enjoying the experiance. Package it up and sell it to some rube as a "Smart" TV.

> But then they want to program everything in html/javascript/css 7 layer lasagna stacks, this is where things start to get bad.

The alternative is that every TV SoC has its own SDK and most of them don't get [your preferred streaming app]. Those apps that get ported would probably perform better, but most TV makers don't want to take the risk of missing out on an app that will lead customers to someone else. LG and Samsung do stand apart with WebOS and Tizen, but those aren't exactly high performing UXes either.

At the end of the day, I'm not sure if 'UX is not so bad' is a marketable feature for a TV, much as I'd like it to be.

My personal journey has led me to stand alone Rokus, but I'd love to find something that can do "everything": I want to play blu-ray 4k discs from the network, without transcoding and with the full hdr10+ (when available) and bitstreamed atmos and the silly menus, regular blu-ray and dvd too; I would like a selection of top teir streaming apps to work properly (at least Netflix and Amazon, one of the heavily ad supported one that has a lot of 80s tail content too would be nice); it needs to have a spouse acceptable interface; shouldn't cost more than $100.

Roku + optical player works pretty well. My living room tv has that; I'm running out of patience for apps running on the projector in the theater, and it'd be nice if I could get a new box that replaces apps and the optical player so I could move the 4k optical player to the living room.

People say Apple TV or NVidia Shield, but they're both pricy and I'm not sure either really does 4k BluRay with menus?

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