Prophet Zarquon

I’m very lactose tolerant. I tolerate the gas, I tolerate the cramps, I tolerate the bloating…

Oooh, cheesecake!

“STOP”

ChromeCast was far too finicky & app-dependent for my liking; also didn’t seem to add any platform-specific content I cared about.

Samsung was awful. Didn’t work with anything except Samsung & then still very app-specific.

Raspberry Pi is a great way to put a proper desktop browser, & standard devices like a HDD/NAS, KB/mouse, touchscreen control, on a TV; but it doesn’t receive casts from one’s phone out of the box, nor offer any exclusive streaming content. That said, a Pi running Kodi can be a pretty great media center PC, for content you already have.

Roku often has free streaming content that I & my family actually like to watch.

I also find it to be a much less tightly gated app ecosystem, than ChromeCast etc. There are Roku apps (annoyingly called “channels”) that allow me to cast whatever files I’ve got on mobile, or whatever media streams I browse to; no restrictive “this app doesn’t cast that” limitations. I have seen similarly general-purpose casting apps for ChromeCast etc, but the only ones I’ve seen used were a lot more limited than what I run on Roku. Several seemed to have had their functionality actively disrupted by system updates from Google. Never had any such issue on Roku; in fact, my venerable RokuHD unit plays more codecs than it used it, & had an actual bugfix just last year, despite Roku announcing EOL in 2019. The RokuExpress is a bit of a dog (about as slow as the RokuHD), but it works for non 4K content. The RokuUltra has worked flawlessly so far.

I don’t know of any smart TVs from major OEMs, that support streaming direct from Samba shares / NAS, right out of the box; but there are apps (“channels”) for that.

Roku remotes have no numbers on them; if you get a RokuTV (a TV with Roku built-in), it will not ever accept numbers input, even from another remote. For this reason, I recommend getting a TV with proper tuner & number keys, if there’s any chance the TV will get used for actual OATV broadcasts. (“Free, over the airwaves, as God intended.” - David Letterman)

ATSC 3.0 is getting encrypted, though (violates the terms of the broadcast license, but the FCC isn’t stopping it). So, useful OATV without internet, may disappear soon anyway. Also worth noting: changing channels betwen encrypted ATSC 3.0 OATV streams, is sloooow. Like really slow; don’t push the button too quickly or the TV tuner might crash, slow.

None of the streaming devices like ChromeCast/Roku/etc, have the full breadth of DigitalVideoRecorder capability. If you actually want a great OATV DVR experience, consider getting an external ATSC 3.0 tuner with “NextGen TV” certification logo. You might even want a dual/multi tuner unit: Even though many TVs & streamboxes & tuners, have multiple inputs, none of them support Picture-In-Picture except the dual tuner units. More than I can say for the TVs themselves: HiSense replaced a 40" with a 44" because the power-switch daughterboard died, & they sent a replacement part but then realized they had no techs in the area to install it. (They didn’t have the 40" anymore, poor me.) Element has repeatedly made their tuner app worse & worse, to the point where it doesn’t even go to what channel you’re on when you pull up the guide, dumps out of the guide at seemingly random intervals, & sometimes switches to the wrong channel & then freezes up. Bear in mind, the TV manufacturer makes the OATV tuner app, for each of these TVs, not Google/Roku/etc. Which makes the insanely bad layout of the Samsung TV & casting apps, even more inexcusable: they had control of both ends, & seem to have put minimal effort into anything but restricting features that were “universal” over 10 years ago.

I like Roku, but their remote is stupid, for those few people who still watch OATV.

I think the best of both worlds is to get a TV with a good built-in tuner \ tuner-app, then hook a standalone Roku unit to it. All the Roku features & you get to keep the number keys & CC button.

Just make sure it isn’t running Android 4.4

Most “smart” TVs (which can & do fetch currently-airing show data from each channel’s metadata streams, when tuned to that channel) rely on internet connectivity to show the channel guide, so implicitly, that they act slow & buggy when used without internet.

Some “smart” TV’s tuner apps, seem to get buggier & less convenient after updates, as if the manufacturer decided to gimp the tuner, in an effort to force more streaming usage.

So real; I have just years of old '90s SciFi etched into my brain. SciFi novels, too, but it might be nice if some percentage were nonfiction? I dunno, honestly at this point I’m just glad when I see media with a plot that I don’t immediately foresee the denouement of.

Weirdly, I watch less TV now than when I had more monthly bills to work off.

I was even doing pretty well about steering clear of social-marketing sites, until SMBC-comics added a comments section directly below the first of four stops on my (semi-)daily funny pages.

Similarly to I2P, IPFS sites can be relatively decentralized & censorship resistant; so, that & social features, are probably why Veilid was mentioned.

They’re intrinsically more suited to private cliques than public sharing, so I agree that they don’t really replace major public forums like TPB or the old KAT.

That said, TPB’s continual relaunches are about the best a well-known centralized public site can manage, on a system as oppressive as the corporate-run “internet” we have today.

It’s a lot harder to shut down P2P apps & devices, than websites on the clearnet.

It’s planned to have communication features beyond file-transfer, but otherwise I’m not sure what similarity you’re seeing, to what the OP suggested…

Which describes torrent apps 15 years ago. I’m really not sure what people think is missing?

True, and we have that already.

Search engine functionality goes in the sharing\communication app.

DHTs in the '90s already had search & tagging & even some rudimentary social networking, built in.

Networks like Tribler’s don’t really need a lot more features, so much as just raw usage; most people torrenting are still using the mainline DHT, which doesn’t have a search layer.

That’s largely on those users. Advanced DHT search with rich social features, already exists for those who decide to use it.

THIS is a good suggestion; I’m not aware of any decentralized search that also specifically helps find subtitles.

Apps being able to search opensubtitles.org\com via the API, are a great convenience, but I’m not aware of any comparably convenient way to submit subtitles. Currently, it’s a bit of a pain, just to try & help. (For instance, .srt files with perfectly standard formatting, rejected for no discernable reason whatsover, requiring upload in .ass format instead.)

+1 to just use Tribler, as it already does most of what OP mentioned:

• Social features
• Discovery\follow
• Patronage\ratios
• Sync (via following \ autodownload)
• Curation\filtering\tags

Doesn’t really do privacy, but P2P over corpnets ≠ private; for “privacy”, use a proxy (or torrent exclusively things no one gets jailed for, like entertainment video\music\books).

(I know this sounds insane, but I don’t use a proxy for torrenting, yet the only ISP that ever complained was CenturyLink, when using a friend’s computer that lacked ad-blocking, to download extremely well-known torrents of a recent show, without removing the tracker URLs from the magnet link. Since 2005, zero complaints from my own torrenting, AFAIK…? I even torrent directly on my phone & cast to a TV. 🤷 I’m not recommending a no-proxy philosophy, just noting that I’ve never had an issue that required me to proxy\VPN up, even when DLing apps.)

+1 to those who said DHT.

There’s no tagging support, but I’m not sure why I’d need tagging.
DHT crawling reveals pretty much every active public torrent, & finding what I want is just a matter of including it in the search terms.

“s04e10 2160p x265” brings up every torrent containing a file with s04e10, 2160p, & x265 in its filename.

I could foresee plenty of situations where tagging for quality, & for metadata beyond filenames & sizes, would be useful; I just haven’t actually had it come up.

Everything I need shows up on DHT search.

Well, except .STL files, but that seems to be because they’re given away for free so often there’s no impetus to make torrents of them?

DHT crawlers find pretty much all the active torrents. No shortage of 4K content; as @burgersc12@sh.itjust.works said, just add 2160p to the search terms.

No trackers needed. (Omit the tracker URLs when loading magnet links too; they’re not at all necessary.)

Steam is even helping to push more people to Linux, by ending Steam support on WIn7, this January 2024.

I would probably have left Win7 running on several older machines, but like XP it’s become so widely unsupported that I can’t really condone using it online anymore even if the app-services allowed it. Unlike XP, there’s a lot of apps that would run fine on Win7 if supported; but like XP there’s just not much incentive for a dev to support such an old OS except as a pet project.

Win ≥8 is awful; I’ve helped Win10 users recover from the most insanely unacceptable issues I’ve ever seen in ≥35 years of using computers, with absolutely useless official responses made in each case. I will never poison one of my own machines with something so heinous as Win10, just for the sake of a game. And other than games, I don’t see a compelling use case for Windows anymore.

So, Linux, & holding out hopes for decent Steam action on Linux, I guess!?

I can’t speak for anyone else, but yes, mine is.

I’ve never had Prime though. The reason my life is boring and empty, is (I think) because I avoid participating in things I don’t wholeheartedly approve of.

Viewing media, is an insidiously passive form of participation, so I do intently watch plenty of TV\movies (recently figured out it’s about 6-8 things a week).

The rest of my life is just household chores, bicycling, & traveling when I get the chance.
Doing Things makes me feel like Ged.

Yeah, where my Mom lives, the food options are:

• Walmart
• An erratically pricey local grocery, that rents its building (which has a leaky roof, requiring them to move product when it rains)
• Dollar General
• A farmer’s market that’s open once a week for a few hours before the afternoon heat, a few months a year, if no events have pre-empted it, having an inventory of which about 30% is bulk-bought supermarket produce with the labels (sometimes) removed
• A 90 minute drive; no trains, no buses (literally, no buses) to the next largest town

And she lives in a town people drive to, to get food, clothes, medicine, etc.

She gets as much as she can from the local grocer, for whatever that’s worth; the inventory is frequently poor, & about on-par with Dollar General so far as brand-representation, goes. When tourists ask if the store has something, they get pointed to Walmart.

Cable internet? I agree. Nowhere near using all its last-mile capacity, yet.