i bought an hdhomerun today on a whim. if you don't know, that's a network-attached ATSC TV receiver. you plug in an antenna, and any compatible app can simply slurp a raw MPEG2 stream right out of it.
now I mostly hate OTA television, but... I guess I feel offended by the fact that i have no reasonable way to receive it, and i found this thing new in box at RePC for a good price. so, sure, why not.
the neat thing is that it plugs into plex, and as it turns out, this works a lot better than I expected. the one i bought has two tuners, so it can tune in to two separate channels at once, and plex actually handles this quite well - every time you select a channel it starts a Session, and anyone else who tries to view that channel will join your Session. if they try to select a third channel while the two tuners are in use, plex asks which session they want to terminate. neat.
it also turns out that the Mariners game today is actually being telecast on FOX, a channel you can access without paying a $20/mo. rider to add ROOT, a "channel" that exists solely to milk asinine exclusivity contracts, to a $60/mo. streaming service that nobody wants, one that would be moribund if their scumbag execs hadn't made handshake deals in elevators with their coke connections to get even more exclusivity deals
but anyway i felt like watching some base ball, so we pulled that up in plex, and, there it is. neat. ⚾. but at one point, the batter hit a foul, and Daria cackled at something I didn't catch. i wanted to see it, because it seemed funny.
well, fortunately, as soon as you tune in a channel, Plex starts recording it, so we could skip back in the stream and see it. well, she was having a hard time finding the right moment and didn't want to miss the ongoing game - so I opened plex on my laptop, a foot over to our left, opened plex, pulled up the same stream, and scrubbed back until I found the moment in question. all while the game continued to play uninterrupted on her monitor, because we have a central server which receives and buffers the TV stream, and clients that let us mutually access and manipulate that stream however we like.
this is architecturally beautiful. this is what computers can give us. it's the same magic as being able to get up from my PC, go upstairs, and remote into my PC from my laptop and pick up from exactly where I left off. but it's not profitable. this kind of capability doesn't make anyone any money, so we're lucky if we get one good networking feature per decade. "online" shouldn't be a mark of shame, it shouldn't be something that turns me off from a product. networking is at the core of the beauty and magic that computers could be
if anything was ever created for any reason other than to sell another FUCKING subscription service that will evaporate in a year.
Every so often we get glimpses of how human ingenuity, unshackled from the demand to create ROI for capital (or as it emerges from interstices that have escaped attention from the revenue-optimizers), can Make Life Better
every once in a while, a bunch of dipshits who haven't heard the latest word of the capitalist lord get together and convince themselves that there's more money in "making an actual product that solves a problem" than "pretending to solve a problem, maybe one that's unsolvable, charging a subscription to access the solution, then parachuting out as soon as the company looks sellable" and it's like when a bite of delicious meat, left ignored on the edge of the king's plate, lets a droplet of fat plummet to the slate floor, and we break from the scuttle of our unseen and forgotten lives to scramble to slurp up the cooling morsel before it's devoured by the same ever present swarm of ants that mindlessly consumed everything else
