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Dauher posted:Whats the cheapest way to play media from a USB drive of some sort? I've been looking at mini PCs, raspberry pi's, etc but there's so many options from weird small manufacturers that its hard to tell what to trust. I want something around 50 bucks ideally or else I'd just grab a Roku 3, I guess. I'm pretty accustomed to the XBMC set up but it doesnt have to be anything fancy like that. You can snag a Roku 2 for around $50 or so and it works fine for basic stuff like that. I've been running a plex server off of a Macbook Pro on an as-needed basis purely for streaming media to my Roku 2. It wouldn't work if I needed the files available to stream all the time, but for just wanting to kick back and watch some media that's on my HD up on my TV before bed or whatever, it works just fine.
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Oct 6, 2014 01:54
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Aeka 2.0 posted:I thought this thread was how to watch TV, not read a book. no, but you see he doesn't want to watch the right TV and it's very important that everyone know that
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Feb 5, 2015 00:04
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edit: none of what follows should be construed as a recommendation that people pirate content, but it's silly as poo poo not to at least acknowledge the role that it's playing in shaping the post-cable industry. Please don't probate me for simply observing that something exists. On the other hand I'd happily pay $5 or even $10 a month for a channel I watch waaaaaaaaaaaaaay before I'll pay $20-30/month for 400 channels of which I watch maybe 3 or 4. $15 a month for an ESPN only package (let's assume for the sake of arguing it's ESPN, ESPN2, and ESPNU) would actually be pretty in line with what a lot of the single sports are charging for online access to games. I forget the exact amounts right now, but we pay something like $120/yr for MLB.tv and I remember paying something similar-ish to get a good package of college basketball during a year we spent in Germany. Sports are pretty much where they're going to have to make their money when it comes to actual a la carte channels. At this point it's damned near the only thing that people have a compelling reason to watch live any more, barring (maybe) news channels - and even those are pretty well duplicated by news websites. The rough reality (for broadcasters at least) is that in a world with the infrastructure and technical capability for on-demand streaming (not to mention almost trivially easy to find and acquire  ) curated channels that broadcast on a fixed schedule are dying and really don't have a compelling argument to exist any more. All the various powers that be that profit from that model are going to kick and scream but the quicker they figure out how to monetize on-demand in a way that is cheap and easy enough for people to not just pirate the content, the more money they will make in the long term. We aren't there yet. It took about a decade for the music industry to realize that easily downloadable (and later streamable) audio wasn't going to go away no matter how much they wished it was, but here we are now. When is the last time most casual music consumers even saw a full physical album? TV will sort itself out eventually. Right now we're really just in the late 'iPod era' to further extend my music analogy. if you don't give two shits about IP rights, piracy, DRM, etc. it's pretty trivial to live 100% cable free as long as you aren't huge into sports. The fact that the current $20/month package includes ESPN is huge, because it tears down that final, last barrier and without having to deal with the annoyances of shady 3rd party streaming of live broadcasts. If you're willing to play fast and loose with copywright law it's now trivial to go totally cable free without missing anything. The next move is for content providers to find a way to sell their products cheap enough that people won't take the free albeit illegal route. I'm optimistic about it because we're starting to see that. HBO's seems to finally have seen the writing on the wall, probably because it's shows routinely generate the largest, fastest growing torrents over on the end of the universe. To my mind the real question is how the various content providers are going to monetize this. On demand online might be a near inevitability at this stage, but how it's executed certainly isn't.
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Feb 9, 2015 17:12
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Thwomp posted:But this isn't possible without completely blowing up the current studio system, right? Nah, the studios would be fine. poo poo, they'd probably come out ahead. What is really challenged by all this is the current distribution system. Comcast et al make a poo poo ton of money right now by being the middle man that brings you the content. They're the ones that really need to rethink how they're going to be making money in the next 50 years. It's part of the reason why they're so hot on bundling internet and cable subscriptions - the last thing they want is just to become a glorified utility provider, selling you the bandwidth that you use to get your entertainment directly from the contend producers.
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Feb 9, 2015 17:59
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Aeka 2.0 posted:Last time I used usenet all the aggregate/db? sites were falling apart and I couldn't find anything since they would just get taken down before they had a chance of being up. I still pay for satellite, but I find that pirated stuff is better quality, which is loving hilarious. Hrm. . let's see. . . I can use your legal service and endure your un-skippable commercials or I can just download it, have it in better quality, and watch my 40 minute TV show in 40 goddamned minutes not an hour. I would seriously pay extra for a streaming service that didn't feel the need to force adds on me.
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Jun 5, 2015 21:30
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SIR FAT JONY IVES posted:There's not a single service an iPad can't get that a Roku can, as well as also allowing her to play games and read. If she's immobile to the point that a tablet would need a stand somehow I suspect games, web surfing, and other tablet-type activities might not be on the menu.
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Jun 29, 2015 15:44
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AlmightyBob posted:Still waiting for a console version why would I stream on a tablet or browser? Pretty trivial for me to send what is on my tablet or laptop to my tv
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Jul 27, 2015 07:06
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It's been forever since I paid any attention to Hulu. The adds drove me nuts. How is the catalog for the super premium service? If there's some show I checked out of two years ago can I catch up or is it only the most recent X episodes
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Sep 2, 2015 22:28
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They need to pay licensing fees. There are two ways to do this: charge the customer or use ad revenue.
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Sep 2, 2015 23:39
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blugu64 posted:I am amazed that people don't realize that Tivoing and skipping the ads is a better experience then Hulu. You can watch it same day, skip the ads, and either pay about the same for No ads Hulu, or a lump sum. Hulu is a racket. This is assuming you have cable. If you don't $12/mo for no-ads hulu is a hell of a lot cheaper than cable. Yes, there is a lot of stuff that Hulu doesn't have, but it's also a hell of a lot cheaper than even a basic cable package.
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Sep 3, 2015 02:16
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*shrug* I just loving hate commercials and if I want to take a poo poo or check the forums I have a pause button for that. Also it seems that most of the stuff I watch that I get commercials forced on me plays the same loving commercial over and over again. AMC's online streaming in particular is terrible for this. It's bad enough when it's one of the rare ads that I think is mildly clever, but loving horrible when it's a really annoying one. I also tend to watch the majority of TV in bed with my wife at the end of the day, so I'm comfortable and don't really want to get up and do something else while one of those loving insurance ads with the lady in the white apron plays for the thousandth time. Some people don't mind them, others hate them.
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Sep 3, 2015 16:56
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porkface posted:I like watching 3 shows per hour rather than 2. This. Once you figure out that most non-HBO TV is either 20 minutes or 40 minutes long you really, really get annoyed at how much time you're wasting watching insurance ads.
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Sep 3, 2015 17:28
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tonic posted:Finally, I love the headphone port on the remote on the Roku 3. Oh god this. We've got a 2 and the fact that my wife can watch TV while I work in the same room is just goddamned incredible.
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Oct 6, 2015 18:02
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Somehow I don't think it counts as easy cord cutting of it is dependent on using your parents' cable login.
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Dec 18, 2015 00:08
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Meydey posted:Well, I did have equipment to drop off. Plus the new Comcast stores are halfway decent. I was able to watch the screen as he configured our new account. Even got to point out in the device list for my account the difference between a Motorola 6121 and a Zoom 5341J. He wanted the MAC for the Zoom and claimed he never noticed the model number column. It has only taken me 4 years to get the drat 6121 off my equipment list. I hope you got a receipt. The last time I dropped a box off at a comcast office they insisted they never got it.
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Feb 13, 2016 21:27
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I've got an oddball question that I figured someone in this thread might have an easy answer for: have there been any studies about the age distribution of cord cutters? Anecdotally it feels like it's way more common with people under 40, but I'd actually like to see real numbers on it.
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Mar 28, 2016 17:01
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Capt. Morgan posted:http://www.pewinternet.org/2015/12/21/4-one-in-seven-americans-are-television-cord-cutters/ Thanks!
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Mar 28, 2016 18:35
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Anyone know of Roku 2s have known problems with buffering? Ours has to load at least once overt ten minutes with MLBtv but my wife's tablet streams it no problem. Sane network both wireless sane time of day etc. we tested it tonight one after the other with the sane stream. Roku buffet buffet buffet, iPad worked fine, back to roku for buffet fun. It's getting old so I'm open to it being dying hardware.
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Sep 20, 2016 07:32
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Thermopyle posted:Nope. Watching other people play games is terrible. The better ones are basically podcasts with a video game happening in the background, frequently talking about drat near anything but what's going on in the game.
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Sep 22, 2016 01:46
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Functional pause/ rewind and on demand for content are the biggies. I have zero patience for streaming an actual broadcast channel. Why the gently caress do I want to tune in at 7 or whatever to see what I'm interested in? These are becoming more and more common but not fast enough.
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Oct 26, 2016 18:12
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I think it's an age thing. I haven't felt the need to talk about last nights episode of whatever since I was in my late 20s. Meanwhile my 7 year younger sister just had a walking dead season premier watching party for her coworkers.
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Oct 27, 2016 20:02
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Does anyone know what's going on with the Roku ESPN app? We've got two Rokus in the house, a fancy new 4 and a years old 2. Everything on the 4 works fine EXCEPT for the espn app. It falls back to buffering all the drat time. It's not a bandwith issue on our end as we can stream stupid high resolution stuff from other sources just fine (example: the new not-Top Gear show on Amazon). If we switch over to the 2, however, ESPN works fine. As far as we can figure it has to be an issue with the app and the old version just works better. Or something. Any ideas? It's not a crippling problem as we've just solved it by having two Rokus plugged into the TV and switching over to HDMI 2 when we want to watch ESPN but it's mildly irritating.
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Feb 20, 2017 15:07
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Silly Burrito posted:See, I see this and wonder. My guess is it's marketing speak for "what the gently caress ever, share your account, we don't care" while trying to sell it as a feature. They limit the number of concurrent streams enough that it's not super convenient to have your extended family on one account, but at the same time they don't need to bother trying to police people bumming their parents subscription.
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Mar 1, 2017 22:23
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Yeah, they're poo poo games, but the important bit is that they're developing the technical capacity and institutional knowledge to live stream games and testing the audience for them. It's a small step, but an important one if you ever want to get to something like MLB.tv for football.
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Apr 25, 2017 15:31
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chocolateTHUNDER posted:I'm not sure what that last part means. Does NFL not offer some sort of online streaming solution like all the other major sports do? lol nope. The NFL sucks. If you want to watch those games streaming you need to cobble something together usually involving a cable subscription so you can access ESPN, TBS, CBS, FOX, and whoever else bought the rights to games through their interface. NFL.com has a Game Pass that gives you streaming access to pre-season games (  ) and eventually lets you watch already aired games after a certain period of time. I forget what the time delay is.Edit: laffo, I just looked it up and it's shittier than I remember. The replays are for past seasons and you can watch condensed games (about 30 minutes per game you watch) for the current season sometime after they air. edit x2: further research shows that there's an online only version of Direct TV's Sunday Ticket for $50/month, but that only gets you out of market games and it only gets you the Sunday games. Again, laffo. edit x3: gently caress me, I just did the math and that's $200 for a 4 month NFL season of only sunday games. Meanwhile MLB.tv is the whole loving April-October for $150 and everything that isn't in your market. Cyrano4747 fucked around with this message at 17:51 on Apr 25, 2017 |
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Apr 25, 2017 17:48
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Ixian posted:
One thing I"ll note is that Amazon's streaming content seems to have been getting worse over the last year or so. I'm seeing fewer and fewer real shows/movies and more and more of the bottom of the barrel poo poo tier - stuff like low budget direct to video horror and sci fi that even the Sci Fi channel at its lowest wouldn't have touched. Their Amazon produced stuff is also very hit or miss, much more so that Netflix. They have a couple of stand outs but most of it is firmly meh. If you're getting Prime anyways it's a cool extra thing to have and it's really convenient as a way to rent digital copies of movies. There's no way I'd grab it just for streaming, though.
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May 6, 2017 20:57
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