That is an unbelievably slick thing that you've got there.

It feels very light-weight, it's approximately instantly-responsive. Back button works. I don't understand the stats (or my contribution to them), but whatever.

(the closed-captioning pop-up causes some overlay issues for me, though)

moar edit: Upon further review with my very not-special desktop box, I'm reasonably confident that this is the quickest, most-responsive "TV-watching" experience I've had since analog NTSC left the scene ~eons ago. It's fast like switching from channel 11 to channel 13 used to be with the very quickest and most well-behaved of tuners.

What aren't you doing that everyone else is doing?

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dtagames 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Thank you so much! What a nice thing to hear.

The short version is that it uses my own engine, called Watson. I used to work for a small game studio inside a big company and my specialty was tooling. I had built my own before I started there and when they shutdown, it evolved into Watson[0].

It's lightweight because it's a static site with no server, it has no spying code or SDKs, and it puts the broadcasters HLS stream URL directly into a <video> element in your browser with minimal intervention.

[0] https://watsonengine.io

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SoftTalker 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Looks potentially very nice but the majority of the channels I tried were "blocked in my area or not broadcasting"

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dtagames 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Thanks for the feedback and I'm sorry that happened. Because the data comes from a public GitHub list of channels, the app has no way to know what will be geoblocked for you (or not) or actually online at the moment (or not) until you try to tune it -- very much like an old analog TV.

But... TV Explorer does keep track of what's tunable (with status lights down the left column) and also lets you scan in the background to find the ones that are live for you right now.

https://tvexplorer.live/help/25-things-18

	▲	SoftTalker 8 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Thanks, I'll play with it a bit more.

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ninkendo 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> Back button works

Maybe a little too well... I tried a whole bunch of channels to get an idea of which ones work, and my history was too full to get out of the site. Maybe every channel change doesn't need to push to your history list.

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dtagames 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Very good point. Thank you, and I'll put a limit on it. 10?

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michaelmrose 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Generally filling up the buffer is fine. It's perfectly normal that after viewing a certain number of documents one has to manually decide where to go.

You know what you need. A button that goes back but instead of going to the prior document goes to the first document with a different domain than the current one.

	▲	ninkendo 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Yeah, I'm not convinced it's really the site's fault... I can understand the logic of wanting the back button to go back a channel, but also I generally want to go "out" of a page when I hit the back button, so there's no real one-size-fits-all answer. But speaking only for myself, if history.pushState was removed from my browser I would probably be happier in the end. JavaScript SPA's abuse it 10x more often than they use it appropriately, I'd rather that if you're an SPA anyway, you implement your own in-app navigation and let my browser's mean "get me out of this app". Lord knows SPA's already reinvent every other web standard, why not one more...

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mschuster91 10 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> What aren't you doing that everyone else is doing?

Seems to be the fact that there's no advertising, tracking or other SDKs and the entire JS is contained in two files.

	▲	dtagames 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Thank you for noticing!