Yet another Hacker News

Re-Engineering YouTube for the Living Room: Bringing "Chrobalt" to RDK

19 points losgehts 2 hours ago 7 comments

lukevp 1 hour ago | parent

We definitely need more spyware from Google in our smart TVs, can’t wait!

hn3ufz62f7 1 hour ago | parent

Cobalt existed mostly because low end TV SoCs choked on full Chromium, so it's less new spyware than the same app finally getting a browser that fits.

bschwindHN 1 hour ago | parent

Oof, that screenshot is pretty dire UI.

Do we really need a "next-generation living room web engine"? These smart TV OSes almost always suck ass, I wish all the TV manufacturers would just give up and ship simple panels with just basic volume and input selection control.

Or if you absolutely _must_ insist on shipping "smart" features, why do you still need to ship a full browser engine to show some text, rectangles, and images?

huslage 28 minutes ago | parent

People watch YouTube on their TV. Having an independent rendering engine makes the TV OS's garbage stuff go away from the perspective of YouTube's app.

troupo 20 minutes ago | parent

All apps on smart TVs are browser apps. Some, like Youtube, get special privileges (that is, can run their own app), but also need to run some kind of UI since TVs have no standard UI libraries. Youtube decided to run a stripped down version of Chrome (Cobalt). Others (IIRC Netflix) run their own renderer. Or do weird stuff, see Comcast and Lightning https://www.lightningjs.io/

TVs own interfaces are some bespoke one-off stuff that isn't exposed to other apps.

And this sucks because Raspberry PIs have more powerful hardware than even modern high-end TVs.

seabrookmx 14 minutes ago | parent

There's some exceptions to this rule. Google TV devices are Android under the hood and thus, the TV apps are Android apps distributed as apk's just like on smartphones (not web apps).

noir_lord 37 minutes ago | parent

Regular Firefox running on a Linux computer works just fine.

I don’t need more surveillance in the guise of consumer tech in my life, much less if anything.

My “smart” TV has never seen the network, nor is it ever going to, it displays pixels from a device running software that respects the user, gets constant and regular security updates and that I control, that is its one and only job.