LB: it's amazing how much worse the experience of watching movies, TV, and anime is now than bootleg *.mkvs circa 2008. Pause buttons are laggy on most streaming service players, if they work at all, audio cuts in and out when pausing and unpausing, OSDs take up giant portions of the player window, good luck not accidentally hitting "skip intro" or "skip credits," and then this shit with subtitles.
Like, once upon a time, you had a *video* player that was good at playing *videos*. Not Hulu shows or Netflix movies, *videos*. It handled things like play/pause, subtitles, scanning forward and back, chapter navigation and the like so that every single studio making stuff didn't have to reimplement all that.
@xgranade don't forget the just plain insulting login times. Frequently north of ten thousand msec on my Rokus, on Hulu, Netflix, Disney, Paramount, you name it.
Hilariously, TUBI is the fastest streaming service login I have.
@jimsalter I was mainly focusing on the experience of playing a video, more than getting the thing to play, but yeah. The whole rest of the way streaming apps work is a bunch of BS, too. It always amazes me when streaming apps are laggy on a PS5 of all bloody things. Like, you're just showing me a list of thumbnails, you can do that on a potato, how are you this slow on an absolute powerhouse?
@xgranade I got that. The thing that pisses me off about the slow logins is that there is no real technical hurdle to overcome, it's not even anything that requires much EFFORT. Just spin up a few more auth servers in the farm.
But they're all like "ah, why bother giving the peons a tolerable experience." It's just the sheer naked contempt business sociopaths have for the people whose money they feel entitled to.
"Let them eat cake."
@xgranade btw as long as we're screaming about UX, how about this modern craze for "reels/shorts" that strips nearly all playback controls, giving you nothing but "next video" and "previous video?"
Awful.