I just watched the Rerez video essay about the Ouya debacle earlier today. I followed Ouya news for a bit when the hype was strong, and I knew it fell off hard. But man, I didn’t realize just how bad it was.
I have an Ouya and an original Steam controller…
I sold my Ouya and have an original Steam controller still
I’m hoping Steam Machines usher in good TV/movie streaming apps for Linux. I’d love to use a miniPC with a remote to replace AndroidTV/Roku
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Lol. What planet did you spend your life on before arriving here on earth this morning?
Kodi has existed for about 25 years and mini PCs plugged into the living room TV was popular even 40 years ago with the c64.
All the parts you need already exist, you just need to put it all together.
Even though I know this is satire, it still made want to shoot OP.
I had an Ouya. I was hoping to use it as an open platform to play games on the TV, but yeah, that didn’t happen. The Raspberry Pi fulfilled that need until I got a Steam Deck.
💀
Have a friend who swore by on live.
He also bought an Ouya.
He also subscribed to Stadia.
He also pre-ordered an Amico.
Obviously I don’t trust this friends judgment
Ask this friend which stocks to buy then short sell it.
I bought Cyberpunk on Stadia on release day, since I couldn’t play it anywhere else, and it was actually great for me. The technical issues I ran into were all because the game was buggy, not because the service was bad. The biggest issue was the self self-fulfilling prophecy that Google was going to kill it, and not worth subscribing to (which they eventually did kill because of low usage). I think that if Google had spun out Stadia as it’s own company, it may have succeeded.
Thats the thing about Google isn’t it.
Even non techie people don’t trust them to keep any new service going, so they have to force people to use their new services, which of course comes with a ton of bad will, and then when people inevitably don’t like this and don’t spend as google has envisioned, they shutter it, continuing the cycle of failing more and more and probably reinforcing internally the idea that the only way to make more money is through enshitification rather than innovation, because they can’t admit to themselves they’ve destroyed their brand image.
Same here, Stadia was great the entire time it lasted. But I have good internet, so that helped. But yeah the killing factor of it ended up being google as you said. Very unfortunate.
I was betting on Stadia being the future of gaming. Without having to mess with hardware or software it was an amazing product. Their service was great, but we all know how it turned out. At least they refunded me all my purchases.
Hah I actually made a profit on their shutting down. Or at least, on Cyberpunk 2077. Bought CP77 and got a free controller + Chromecast bundle, sold the Chromecast for 45 bucks and got Cyberpunk refunded in full. After buying it again on sale through Steam, I had a profit of 15€.
And I still have the controller! The Stadia controllers are awesome.
Quadruple threat of grifts
I am sure there are more I’m not remembering
Sounds like a counter recommendary (anti-recommendist?), whatever they recommend look for the opposite instead
Ouya? More like Oi Vey!
Damn, beat me to it, except I was gonna say “Ouya? Try ‘Oh no!’”
I was going to go for “Ouya trying to fool with this post?”
Jesus Christ
I have an Ouya. It’s embarrassing, I feel shame for purchasing it, but I keep it as a reminder of how fucking dumb I can be.
The thing is, there is nothing super wrong with the idea, it just didn’t pan out.
We can see from the existence of nintendo consoles, that graphics don’t mean the world.
I loved mine! Did exactly what I bought it for, emulation on my TV and playing media from my server. Replaced it with a Shield eventually, but don’t regret backing it on Kickstarter.
Hey now. Its ok we all make booboos. I bought a Game Gear.
you dared to dream, and i applaud you for that.
it’s a little ARM box running Android, right?
Yup. Controller was shit.
I didn’t get mine to have less than about a second latency LOL
Oh dang, it was my media PC until 2017, when the switch took over its role, IIRC. Definitely got my money’s worth out of it even if there were no games lmao
Ouya wasn’t all bad though! Some great games came out of it. Towerfall and Bombsquad are still favorite party games in my house. No Brakes Valet and Hidden in Plain Sight also still get played occasionally.
Fair. I did use it for emulating NES and SNES, but the controller connection was horrible, so I found it easier to use the Raspberry Pi.
Now it’s in my shelf along with my other consoles: C64, PS1-4 (5 is in the living room), PSP, DS and gaming stuff and collectibles. People usually ask about it, lol.
The controller was absolute garbage! The analog sticks would get snagged where the battery covers split. Batteries on the front for who knows why.
Lol mine’s living in the closet now and thankfully all those games have released for the
PCGabecube. I’ll keep the hardware as a fun experiment in history though.my controllers pinched my hands constantly where the metal meets the plastic shell
towerfall on ouya was pretty frikkin teriffic as the killer app though
I remember when it was on kickstarter. I went back and forth about backing, I ended up pulling my pledge just before it was funded. So glad I did.
I went all in on it… I fully drank that Koolaid and was an early backer, got an extra controller and really thought it was going to be amazing. But their whole launch was so bungled that by the time I actually got it I was so disillusioned with the whole company that I couldn’t enjoy it. It sucked to have bought into the kickstarter and financed the project, and then see the product on the shelves at Target while I was still waiting on mine to be delivered. I had mine for a couple of months before reselling it at a loss.
Several years later when Stadia was announced I felt that little familiar glimmer of hope pop up, but I didn’t let myself get too excited for it. I did eventually get a couple of Stadia controllers and really enjoyed that service (and I still use those controllers today).
It sucked to have bought into the kickstarter and financed the project, and then see the product on the shelves at Target while I was still waiting on mine to be delivered.
Shit, I didn’t realize it got that bad. I’m honestly surprised I didn’t hear more rage about that online at the time.
I went all in on it… I fully drank that Koolaid and was an early backer, got an extra controller and really thought it was going to be amazing.
Are you me? I was backer 4 🤦♂️
Yeah I had one too. Ultimate reminder to never pre-order.
The name if pretty whimsical tho wich seems like a big plus.
heh, I have Superbook for the exact same purpose! (for the uninitated: it was a “laptop” which used your phone/tablet/etc as the tech, it was basically just a 1080p screen and keyboard for a phone).
Mine took 3-4 factory resets and firmware flashes to get working, and then the damn thing gave up the ghost the same night and hasn’t worked since… not that it has any real use anyway. Good buy /s
I wanted to buy one when I saw it in target years ago for dumb reasons, now I want to biy one to tinker with.
This is my biggest regret purchase lmao. Which is good. But yeah I basically never used it. Very unlike me because I would rather eat my bad decision. But it’s was so laggy I turned it off and waited for updates that never came. Took me years to finally throw it away.
Ouya walked so Steam box can run. /s
If by walk you mean it suffered from polio…
Exactly. Ouya was such a disaster.
I have an ultra rare OnLive streaming console. I will let it go at the low, low price of one Steam Machine if anyone wants to trade!
I have that and an ‘OnLive founding member’ T-shirt that I wear to tech events. Especially when I suspect there’s going to be something tone-deaf getting launched.
I got both for free.
Wow, replied before I saw this. 2 on live references in a single thread, feel like I just spotted a bigfoot or something
Wonder if anyone ever managed to homebrew it to run something else
I wish. But sadly no, it is merely ewaste trash I will eventually pass on to a recycler.
Reminds me of the OG Xbox controller.
Everyone forgets how big that sucker really is.
And how it was a blatant copy of the Dreamcast controller.
The Dreamcast controller is ugly as sin but surprisingly comfortable to hold. It must have the widest delta between looks and ergonomics of any controller.
Similarly:
If you really digest everything Microsoft does, it’s all stealing or acquiring and making worse.
I really liked The Duke. It was one of the first controllers that actually fit well in my large adult size hands!
Because the Xbox was built in secret while Microsoft and Sega collaborated on the Dreamcast. It’s actually somewhat compatible with Dreamcast games but MS never wanted to allow that feature.
Also the Duke is the only comfortable controller I have ever used.
The smaller (now regular) 360 controller killed those black and white buttons.
It just moved them, and I’m glad they did
I miss them. But I guess I’m in the minority on that one.
The logo circle is so big and vulgar it looks like a fake gucci bag. It’s great they got rid of that.
Using the white and black buttons on the Duke without moving your entire hand nets you an achievement.
I miss that big bastard. Everything these days causes my hands to cramp up because they’re too small.
There’s at least one modern recreation of the Duke Controller. I’ve never used it myself, but it seems to be good:
I’m a big fan of their DuchesS which is a recreation of the second OG Xbox controller (controller S). Especially with backwards compatible OG Xbox games.
I’ve considered the Duke recreation though.
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I think I might want to get one of those controllers. the trackpads on the Steam Deck were way better than I was expecting.
Haven’t heard that name in years.
