Hacker News Reader

Comment by flutas | Hacker News Reader

Also really depends on what codecs are done in software vs hardware on the device.

Speaking from working on the Android/Fire TV devices, they all have at most one hardware decoder, which really limits what the streaming companies can do. My team recently launched a multiview feature on A/FTV and we had to do so much hand holding and device detection work (4K decoder) to try and make the experience good and hide it from others...

Meanwhile the mobile teams, roku, iOS / tvOS / vision pro teams can full send with 4 players because the devices all have multiple hardware decoders... for some reason Android TV devices are along in this category.

View on HN

> a multiview feature...

I'm actually surprised you're able to support true multiview across diverse hardware platforms at all - so congrats! Consumer streaming sticks, dongles, boxes and smart TVs are a fragmented hellscape between divergent hardware, firmware, OSes, codecs, DRM and apps. Pretty much anything more demanding than baseline '1 stream in 1 app' will have lurking issues on at least one platform with a >1M unit installed base.

The android streaming device market pretty much died when it became a race to zero margin. Arguably, the best Android-based streaming device money can buy is still the NVidia Shield, which is a 10 year old hardware design.

> I'm actually surprised you're able to support true multiview across diverse hardware platforms at all - so congrats!

We had to define a ton of different variables to try to categorize the system, and from that we track playback events (buffering, errors, etc) and if a device family as a whole shows too many issues we kill switch the feature for that device. This is on top of device side watchdogs that kill the feature for a user specifically if we fail to have a baseline playback performance with the software decoder. It's a very hands on feature, but I'm proud of the work our team did!

> Arguably, the best Android-based streaming device money can buy is still the NVidia Shield, which is a 10 year old hardware design.

Absolutely. As an example other devices had good playback at only 360p, but couldn't hit 540p. Shield can reliably hit x2 720p streams.

It's still my daily driver for personal browsing and the device I primarily develop on (also the only 64 bit kernel ATV device currently iirc). The Walmart Onn Pro 4K boxes are the runner up in my experience, they're pretty good.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com