What you want is a Debrid service subscription and an app like Stremio to deliver torrents directly to your TV at gigabit speeds. Simple to set up and no hassle. Just browse like it’s Netflix, pick something to watch, and watch it. Throw a third party YouTube app on there like SmartTubeNext, and those are the only two apps you’ll need on your TV ever.
That’s all I want out of a smart TV. A simple, ad-free Android interface that can run those two apps, with full support for modern home theater stuff like HDR, HFR, and Dolby Atmos. Nothing more, nothing less.
Also VLC requires you to curate a movie collection. I’m too old to keep doing that shit.
These days I use a Debrid service to steam torrents directly to my TV at gigabit speeds, with Stremio as my frontend to give me a Netflix-like experience. You get all the convenience of a modern streaming service, without the exorbitant fees nor the hassle of managing a Jellyfin server. Just fire up the TV and pick something to watch.
Its a death by 1000 cuts sort of thing with a few key omissions that fill the grave.
I’m certain there are far more things but I will just list the things I recall being missing/being lacking/being better with potplayer.
Playlists are sooo much better on pot player. I’m sure there are dedicated apps for having some netflix like experience at home like jelly fin etc, but if you just have a loose collection of shows and content, just being able to have simultaneous tabs for playlists where you can drop a whole season and switch with low effort is awesome. The fact that it remembers your place in the playlist and your place in the video (I know VLC does do the latter) is also awesome. You close the app and open it, and everything is like you left it.
VLC has well known, or rather long known issues with image quality where upon starting, seeking, pausing, (and this is a very laymans long memory explanation), pot player would basically go back to the last key frame so that the image looks perfect right away, while VLC will just have a few garbled frames for no good reason. Not to mention, the UI of Pot player makes codec choices for both audio and video extremely accessible.
The UI of Potplayer is lightyears ahead in terms of functionality. You can do so much more, so much more easily with hotkeys, the important controls and menu’d options are faster to find (behind less layers and searching), and its easier on the eyes.
Pot player supports 360 video while VLC does not. It says it does, but the experience is so horrifically bad (or at least was the last time I checked it), that it in practice does not support 360 video, so if you want to just play a 360 video on a 2d screen you are very out of luck. The biggest issue is surprisingly just that there is no fast and easily available method to just tell it to treat a video as a 360 video, nor is it easy to access the relevant 360 video settings (like is it side by side, top down, equa… you get the point). Pot player has all of that immediately available and you can even set whether or not a video is treated as a 360 video via a hotkey. VLC relies on some terrible method that doesnt work the majority of the time to figure out if a video is 360, and I wasn’t able to find a convenient way to just tell it to treat a video that way. Painful doesn’t begin to describe it.
The UI while being nicer to use, also takes up less space and has more sane default keybinds.
Those are just what I thought up in the process of making this comment. I don’t have like PKB for this so I’m sure there is a lot left out and there might be minor errors due to memory, but potplayer not having a linux equivalent at least to me is a big downside.
VLC already exists.
Unless you mean streaming services like Netflix?
VLC? Really? My dude’s still living in the 2000s.
What you want is a Debrid service subscription and an app like Stremio to deliver torrents directly to your TV at gigabit speeds. Simple to set up and no hassle. Just browse like it’s Netflix, pick something to watch, and watch it. Throw a third party YouTube app on there like SmartTubeNext, and those are the only two apps you’ll need on your TV ever.
That’s all I want out of a smart TV. A simple, ad-free Android interface that can run those two apps, with full support for modern home theater stuff like HDR, HFR, and Dolby Atmos. Nothing more, nothing less.
I think they mean they want apps with a TV like interface, and that’s not VLC.
Also VLC requires you to curate a movie collection. I’m too old to keep doing that shit.
These days I use a Debrid service to steam torrents directly to my TV at gigabit speeds, with Stremio as my frontend to give me a Netflix-like experience. You get all the convenience of a modern streaming service, without the exorbitant fees nor the hassle of managing a Jellyfin server. Just fire up the TV and pick something to watch.
Truly, VLC sucks compared to say PotPlayer.
PotPlayer looks the same as any other media player for PC and it’s only for Windows. What about it makes VLC suck by comparison? 🤨
Its a death by 1000 cuts sort of thing with a few key omissions that fill the grave.
I’m certain there are far more things but I will just list the things I recall being missing/being lacking/being better with potplayer.
Playlists are sooo much better on pot player. I’m sure there are dedicated apps for having some netflix like experience at home like jelly fin etc, but if you just have a loose collection of shows and content, just being able to have simultaneous tabs for playlists where you can drop a whole season and switch with low effort is awesome. The fact that it remembers your place in the playlist and your place in the video (I know VLC does do the latter) is also awesome. You close the app and open it, and everything is like you left it.
VLC has well known, or rather long known issues with image quality where upon starting, seeking, pausing, (and this is a very laymans long memory explanation), pot player would basically go back to the last key frame so that the image looks perfect right away, while VLC will just have a few garbled frames for no good reason. Not to mention, the UI of Pot player makes codec choices for both audio and video extremely accessible.
The UI of Potplayer is lightyears ahead in terms of functionality. You can do so much more, so much more easily with hotkeys, the important controls and menu’d options are faster to find (behind less layers and searching), and its easier on the eyes.
Pot player supports 360 video while VLC does not. It says it does, but the experience is so horrifically bad (or at least was the last time I checked it), that it in practice does not support 360 video, so if you want to just play a 360 video on a 2d screen you are very out of luck. The biggest issue is surprisingly just that there is no fast and easily available method to just tell it to treat a video as a 360 video, nor is it easy to access the relevant 360 video settings (like is it side by side, top down, equa… you get the point). Pot player has all of that immediately available and you can even set whether or not a video is treated as a 360 video via a hotkey. VLC relies on some terrible method that doesnt work the majority of the time to figure out if a video is 360, and I wasn’t able to find a convenient way to just tell it to treat a video that way. Painful doesn’t begin to describe it.
The UI while being nicer to use, also takes up less space and has more sane default keybinds.
Those are just what I thought up in the process of making this comment. I don’t have like PKB for this so I’m sure there is a lot left out and there might be minor errors due to memory, but potplayer not having a linux equivalent at least to me is a big downside.