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Further, I hate Amazon's interface for managing channels, let alone Prime Video (which is also terrible—shit-tier streaming services most people have never hear

Further, I hate Amazon's interface for managing channels, let alone Prime Video (which is also terrible—shit-tier streaming services most people have never heard of manage to do better). Like almost everything else they make, the UI is wildly not to my taste. I signed up for one exactly once, to watch Twin Peaks: The Return. I'd never do it again. Figuring out how to subscribe was a pain(!), figuring out how to cancel was a pain, and of course the video UI is awful.

drewg123 5y ago
Apple TV does the same sort of channel thing. In general, I prefer the Prime Video app, as the playback interface has a 10s skip, and the video selection interface is less confusing. I honestly wish there was an open source player like Kodi that could be used to play back all these services, and could be customized to not suck.
- handrous 5y ago
  > I honestly wish there was an open source player like Kodi that could be used to play back all these services, and could be customized to not suck. Heh, if there's a way to customize Kodi's UI to not suck, I've yet to find it after much trying, over many years. I think I may just disagree with some of the fundamentals of how they decided to make it work. My ideal would be a c. 2011 or 2012 Netflix UI, but fed by every source. Closest I've found to that is Jellyfin and piracy.
  - drewg123 5y ago
    Thanks for letting me know about Jellyfin. I've been using Plex recently for video, and I hate it. It downright ignores files that it can't find metadata for, which drives me nuts. And I despise their push to login to use anything..
    - handrous 5y ago
      I run it in docker on my file-server machine, with an extremely lazy .sh file with always-restart enabled, so I just run once it and then it comes back up on reboot, too, nothing fancy, just manually change the version number on the image and restart it to upgrade once every few months. The built-in web interface is good, and though for a long time the Roku app was in a weird state where most videos would fail to play, it's mysteriously started working fine again, though I think it's still missing some features (collection browsing, as in grouping media as "the Jaws series" or "the MCU", notably, IIRC). Dunno how the other interfaces are, as those are the only ones I use. The Web UI is pretty good for correcting metadata guesses it gets wrong (a very capable, integrated, non-TV interface for managing media sources and metadata is something I really wish Kodi had). I haven't worked with it in a while but I think it's as easy as providing the correct TVDB or IMDB (or whatever) ID and letting it re-scrape that item. Somewhere on my probably-won't-ever-get-to-it list of projects is writing a Retroarch "core" with a very basic Jellyfin media browser, using the existing Mplayer core (probably having to re-package and wrap it with mine) to play the streams. That'd be perfect.

drewg123 5y ago

Apple TV does the same sort of channel thing. In general, I prefer the Prime Video app, as the playback interface has a 10s skip, and the video selection interface is less confusing. I honestly wish there was an open source player like Kodi that could be used to play back all these services, and could be customized to not suck.

handrous 5y ago
> I honestly wish there was an open source player like Kodi that could be used to play back all these services, and could be customized to not suck. Heh, if there's a way to customize Kodi's UI to not suck, I've yet to find it after much trying, over many years. I think I may just disagree with some of the fundamentals of how they decided to make it work. My ideal would be a c. 2011 or 2012 Netflix UI, but fed by every source. Closest I've found to that is Jellyfin and piracy.
- drewg123 5y ago
  Thanks for letting me know about Jellyfin. I've been using Plex recently for video, and I hate it. It downright ignores files that it can't find metadata for, which drives me nuts. And I despise their push to login to use anything..
  - handrous 5y ago
    I run it in docker on my file-server machine, with an extremely lazy .sh file with always-restart enabled, so I just run once it and then it comes back up on reboot, too, nothing fancy, just manually change the version number on the image and restart it to upgrade once every few months. The built-in web interface is good, and though for a long time the Roku app was in a weird state where most videos would fail to play, it's mysteriously started working fine again, though I think it's still missing some features (collection browsing, as in grouping media as "the Jaws series" or "the MCU", notably, IIRC). Dunno how the other interfaces are, as those are the only ones I use. The Web UI is pretty good for correcting metadata guesses it gets wrong (a very capable, integrated, non-TV interface for managing media sources and metadata is something I really wish Kodi had). I haven't worked with it in a while but I think it's as easy as providing the correct TVDB or IMDB (or whatever) ID and letting it re-scrape that item. Somewhere on my probably-won't-ever-get-to-it list of projects is writing a Retroarch "core" with a very basic Jellyfin media browser, using the existing Mplayer core (probably having to re-package and wrap it with mine) to play the streams. That'd be perfect.