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There is nothing that bugs me more than the intentional enshittification of mobile websites/apps.
I don't want all your shitty apps.
Why do I need an app on mobile, but the website works fine in desktop mode?
Why do mobile browsers even allow shitty sites like Facebook, Instagram and Pinterest to forbid you to save images.
I wouldn't even care, if every second image search result wasn't one of these horrible sites.
The app is intentional, with browsers they can't control which extensions you run, and therefore can't force their ads on you. With the app they can control the environment and you are legally not allowed to modify their app because trademark....
Oh my god yes.
Every fucking time I open reddit on my phone the entire website goes grey and they offer me to use the app... Unless the content is NSFW in which case they tell me I have to use the app.
Fortunately old reddit still works to get around that but it doesn't have a mobile page layout
There's even better workaround - stop going to reddit.
As much as I'd love to, it is still one of the best places to read up on recommendations for stuff, be it hardware opinions or obscure book recommendations. It is certainly a better place for tech reviews than most of the other sites you find using search engines which just do stuff like "This is the best on a budget. This is the best for that. This is the best overall. Here is where you can buy all of that."
Those sites never feel like they do a genuine review of stuff but instead try to sell you something. Plus they feel like they are copy pasting from each other.
I don't really use reddit anymore but I have an android app called stealth that lets you browse. Can't login, but for web links and such its much better than old.
You can subscribe to subs as well, but you can't reply.
I rarely visit Reddit, but when I do, I use Oldlander to make it bearable: https://github.com/OctoNezd/oldlander
In 20 years Disney SWAT team will kill you for making this post.
Tap for spoiler
~~joke~~
The entire app is a slow and clunky mess on our Roku TV. I've never seen a more poorly optimized and irritating service. Every time we're subjected to it I'm dumbfounded that Disney would even greenlight such a thing.
Wait. Why does it have ads? Aren’t you paying them for an ad free experience? If not, what’s the point?
They have an ad plan and an ad-free plan for different costs. I personally couldn't ever imagine myself paying for the privilege of watching ads (and I do pay for D+), but, ¯_(ツ)_/¯
D+ works fine for me on my old cheap Android box, my Nvidia SHIELD and our AppleTV, so I think the 'slow and clunky' part might be a Roku specific issue.
The app design choices though are a mess in other ways. There isn't a 'mark as watched' option, so when it doesn't mark that you watched something (which happens semi-frequently), it attempts to start you on an episode you've already watched and you've got to fast forward through it. It doesn't have 'continue watching' so unless your show is brand new, you've gotta go through the menus to re-find the thing you're watching. It's "pretty" enough at first glance and looks good, but actual usability is not great at all.
Plex & Jellyfin definitely have the better experience, for sure.
‘slow and clunky’ part might be a Roku specific issue
Almost certainly. I have a couple of them and they're like, fine, but the app quality is uneven AF. They're written by the provider and/or some random 3rd party, so some apps work well, some work poorly, and some are flaming piles of crap.
The Disney app being a flaming pile does not, however, surprise me in the least.
Interesting details. I've thought about Roku's a few times and the app quality has always been the thing people seem to complain about, so I've just avoided them.
I mean, for a $15 thing that does 4k your options are pretty much a Roku, or whatever Amazon's thing is called.
I'd MUCH rather have the Roku. And the Plex and Jellyfin apps work great, so what else do you need ;)
Most streaming services have introduced cheaper "ad-supported" tiers within the last few years while jacking up the prices of the existing tiers. There is usually a price gap designed to either make you sit through ads or overpay to remove them. Many (most?) people don't even use ad-blockers in their web browsers and are psychologically trained to sit through ad breaks, either because of TV (older generation) or YouTube (younger generation) which is why these streaming companies can get away with such a betrayal of their original premise.
an add every 5-10min that lasts from 5-40s. Who the hell can actually enjoy a movie or a TV show in these conditions?
Everything comes full circle...
As a kid watching TV, about 30% of the runtime of a show was commercials. Us old people are used to that kind of advertising presence, hell, people used to watch the Super Bowl specifically for the commercials!
Not saying it's a good thing, just saying that the corporate CEOs of today grew up with it, so it's "normal" to them.
I grew up with ads in cable tv, but I never got used to them and I deep resent the emotional manipulation that ads attempt so I will turn a show / movie off if I can't skip the ads. No show is worth being mind flayed by ads.
I have D+ here in Canada and have never seen an ad. It is actually a pretty good deal here as it includes STAR (hulu equivalent). I only watch it on my TV but I dont think it would be any different on mobile as it is still the D+ app.
Disney+ has ads? I'm in Germany and I don't see any. Where are you?
edit: removed comment about browser, as OP meant on the phone
Switzerland. But I think you can get add free plan for double the money.
Why even bother? It's legal to pirate movies and tv shows for personal use in Switzerland!
A lot of people have no idea how to. I've been pirating movies for like 20 years now, and while it's not that hard for me, i once tried to find a movie in german for my nephew and i completely gave up. Everything that is English i can watch in a minute.
Oh, they do have an plan with ads. You can't really complain about ads if that is what you subscribed to, I guess. The price difference is €6 vs €9/month in Germany, btw.
The no browser support on phones kind of sucks though.
Talk about missin the point bro. That point being "paid services are universally inferior to free ones even when excluding the variable of cost"
It's a trade off. "Free services" typically require more leg work and can come with legal or security risks. I used to have a great XBMC & torrenting setup years ago. I spent significant time customizing it and various plugins, extending scripts etc. I had fun, and took necessary precautions. Millions wouldn't. Some are happy to pay €9/month to another evil corp for convenience (where it works for them).
Your setup is (was?) awesome but it's not necessary these days. An online search for free media streaming sites and an ad-blocker (but of course) brings up sites with at least the same polish as Netflix (the only site i have experience with) and full 1080p. When i briefly used my sister's Disney+ and my in-laws' prime, it was noticeably worse than my favorite bookmarked free streaming sites, not to mention i needn't wonder if the service owns all the seasons of the show i wish to see
agree with that
I agree that there are many great free streaming sites out there, with 1080p and good quality.
But quality is still an advantage of paid services (or acquirung the larger files in other ways). Streaming with higher bitrate costs way more bandwidth (= money) while being marginally better.
It's noticeable though, if you have a good, large enough display. Especially darker scenes suffer from low bitrate. On my phone I don't notice it at all.
That's even true for high bitrate. E.g. I've even compared a Reacher WEB-DL to BluRay remux, and the latter was noticeably better — not that it's worth the additional storage usage.
Resolution doesn't mean much, those sites you are referring to use extremely low bitrate encodes that look terrible. Yes, streaming services (in my experience Netflix is the main offender) can sometimes deliver dogshit quality streams too due to their adaptive bit rates, but the ceiling is way higher than those sites that pull from DDL file hosters. If you are consistently suffering from very low quality paid streams then you likely have some kind of network issue affecting the adaptive bitrate.
Could I inquire what accessibility tools and software you use? I generally want to be well educated on these things, but I’ve been considering something like this for myself. Real time captioning software or something like that. I often have headphones or earplugs in for sensory reasons. Even gaming sometimes I’d prefer to not have to hear discord and still communicate with people.
Extensions that turn audio into sign langauge. Makes it easier to follow than captions for me.
I know a bit of ASL and am learning more! That was my other thought for live captioning. I’d like to eventually get gesture based input working to, but that will be a dive into computer vision and all that. I’d still be interested in the name of that extension!!
I know Auslan (australian sign language) but yes
https://github.com/SamChenYu/SignSync
Also this one https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/signup-sign-language-for/gbllbjbhbafgdcolenjhdoabdjjbjoom
I use BSL as it’s closest to Auslan on it but I think they also support ASL and Indian Sign Languave
Thank you so much for the info!
This app live captions any output to your sound device locally https://github.com/abb128/LiveCaptions
Whether I mute my output device, or selectively mute a tab or app it still works fine.
There's a similar feature baked into Win11, not sure whether that is processed locally/privately though
What bought me back to piracy was the twatting about between several apps, only to find that what I wanted wasn't on any of them.
If they want me back, they'll have be more convenient than piracy. And piracy is pretty damn convenient these days.
We're talking one service, all content that isn't still in cinemas, 4K HDR, 5.1 audio. Let's be reasonable, £30 a month with no ads at any time. Feel free to have ad tiers and lower quality if you're charging less or even showing for free. That's not my thing, I'll pay for the good shit tier. I don't need 8 screens at once or whatever nonsense Netflix know you won't use. It's just me, and my big television and sound system.
Music managed this. There's no reason video can't other than greed. I'm done asking nicely.
They didn't manage, they've just offer good enough for you not to care. In case of movies or series you care because they are a lot more limited
Jellyfin and Youtube are seemingly the only web interfaces I can willingly endure.
For youtube though it's only with Premium/ublock origin and some custom filters like blocking channel membership banners.
Edit: Jellyfin is obviously a really good service :)
There had been at least 2 anime shows I've watched that were really good and I was surprised they didn't have much publicity at all. Turns out, both of them are licensed by Hulu/Disney+ outside of Japan. I really shouldn't be surprised.
The shows are Summertime Rendering and Undead Unluck, btw.
I've been back to the high seas for a while.
Before I get into it, I'll give an honourable mention to the RIAA/music industry, which is largely just putting all of the music on every platform and letting users choose which one they want to use. This is the way, and I'm happy to pay one service to get access to the stuff I actually want to hear.
Back to video/MPAA. Are you all on crack? I saw this coming back when Netflix was the only licensed media game on the internet.... I was subscribed and enjoying some shows, the shows then.... Went away, they disappeared. After looking into it, the show I was enjoying was pulled when a copyright was revoked by the publisher, so Netflix no longer had the right to distribute the show.
I saw the writing on the wall. That publisher was going to make their own Netflix competitor with their stuff on it, to try to extort more profit from the streaming stuff. Clearly their c-suite thought that people would be willing to pay for just their content separately from Netflix. I saw that writing and noped right the fuck out. Grabbed my tri-point hat and flag from storage and set sail, and I've never looked back.
The copyright holding asshats, ruined internet streaming, because everyone wanted to be their own thing. They splintered the entire online streaming thing into a bunch of disparate platforms all with some subset of the media available via streaming. It's worse than cable, honestly.
IMO, the only good move that's happened for streaming (but horrible for so many other reasons) was Disney gobbling up all the other media studios and production companies, then putting all their stuff on one service. There's a few holdouts, but by and large the two biggest players right now are Netflix (the OG) and Disney (+)... So a bunch of good media ended up on D+, and so it's kind of "the" streaming service... For better or worse (mostly worse, as OP points out).
I'm still firmly on my ship, sailing the high seas. Unless they go the way of music, and allow all shows on every platform and you pick your platform based on your preferences, I'll stay on this ship. Thanks.
I haven't set foot on 'dry land' since Napster started.
I made the foolish mistake of thinking things had finally started to make sense when Netflix happened, and I got my hopes up that going legit would be viable.
Oh well
Just curious—what accessibility extensions do you use on desktop?
D+ dropped support for my tablet since the Android version is too old, but I just ran Firefox in desktop mode and that worked. I don't know whether it made a difference that it's a tablet vs phone though