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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 PC Gabecube. I’ll keep the hardware as a fun experiment in history though.
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
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.
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.
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 Dreamcast controller is ugly as sin but surprisingly comfortable to hold. It must have the widest delta between looks and ergonomics of any controller.
I have a list of Metroidvanias I’ve started but never completed. The only one that managed to hold my attention to completion that wasn’t an actual Metroid title was Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night. Which is a shame, because Ori and The Blind Forest is beautiful and Hollowknight is very cute, but neither could really hold my attention.
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.
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