this post was submitted on 09 Jan 2024
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This is not only a good way to handle media, it's one of the best.
It blows my goddamn mind that TV manufacturers didn't develop a streaming portal "endpoint" player and band together to require content from Netflix/Hulu/etc meet that standard for delivery. It's made TVs just app boxes.
Can you just imagine being able to see what is available on all services from one interface, all at once, and then start a stream of it seamlessly from whichever you movie profile page you have access to?
Instead we have half-assed lookup apps in some TVs that even when they find it a film then just launch a separate app.
Build a good Plex library and never look back. Buy Blurays and DVDs and lookup how to automate good handbrake encoding. Once you know how, you can honest to god automate most of it, and in my case, I have it auto-launch and rip any disc if it detects a Blu-ray film or DVD film and drop the resulting file in my NAS storage to be sorted. Blurays drives are cheap too now, so you can buy 2-3 and dump a whole library in just a few days.
Apple TV has that single place, but Netflix doesn’t want to use it and now Amazon and a bunch of other streaming services sell “channels” which they pollute the results with content you can’t watch despite paying for the service.
Also, Netflix has the worst UI/UX on AppleTV boxes. The experience is vastly different and better on a Sony or Microsoft device in the Netflix software. It’s pretty odd imho.
What , specifically, do you find irksome on the Netflix ATV interface?
Only thing I dislike is the snippet/trailer autoplay. Everything else, works well for me.
First off, and mainly UX based, different feature sets. For example the way Netflix feeds ‘New and Upcoming’ items, notifications for those items, etc.
I do understand that AppleTV has just recently really solidified their decisions on how they want their controller/remote to work so that may be a factor in designing the software for the navigation across all legacy AppleTV devices. The control schemes on consoles and other media boxes have been a constant for years and years now which probably benefited the look and feel of the flavor of the app on ATV.
This same issue generally happens across other media streaming services. For instance, the Disney app; even slight FFWD is abominable. It’s just pickiness, however I’ll still switch over to the Roku or a console to watch anything on Disney+.
/tome
Although the controls on the second and third gen Apple TV are absolute hell I’ve always liked the fact that Netflix had a native look and feel on them. It actually makes be fairly annoyed when an app has a separate non-native UI.
It’s because Apple provides a very easy to integrate with SDK. A lot of apps I use have the same native UI, like YouTube and Plex, because of this.
You see the utopian version of this with UI navigation perfection. I see what would likely have come of out such a collaboration being a screen 75% full of ads with user telemetry vacuumed up by hundreds of companies I can't opt-out of that would have access to all my viewing data because they're part of the collaboration.
When I was little, we used to have a box plugged into the CRT TVs of the time that, when connected to a network, would allow you access to something similar to what you're saying. Typically, you'd be able to open an electronic program guide to see a menu that displayed all the different services that you're subscribed to and be able to switch between streams seamlessly. Granted, the biggest difference is that the individual service providers had a set schedule as to what was streaming at the time, so if you missed content scheduled at a certain time, you'd hope they'd rebroadcast it at some point.
Maybe we could have something similar, but with the ability to pick anything from each individual service providers' library on demand?
Although there was a problem with this system, but I don't really remember what it was. The service providers banded together and started raising prices, I think? But, then again, aren't they doing something similar now?
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Do you have a "cheap" drive recommendation?
Watch https://diskprices.com/ and Amazon.com for lightning deals. Check any good deals against their historic lows. That's how I got my 12tb and 20tb drives for way cheaper than they regularly go for.
That said, drives are a commodity and you will ha E to spend proportional to the space you want.