Prime Video Uses WebAssembly

https://www.amazon.science/blog/how-prime-video-updates-its-app-for-more-than-8-000-device-types

by pacificat0r • 4 years ago

428 247 4 years ago

rappatic• 4 years ago

It's nice to see a big company like Amazon using Wasm in something that actually sees the light of production (and in something that's used by so many people). I always see tech giants supporting or contributing to newer technologies like Wasm without really using them in important applications.

dwmbt2• 4 years ago

as of late last year - of the large tech companies - it seems that amazon and microsoft might be the biggest Rust (in prod) evangelists. they basically swiped all the mozilla rust devs that were laid off and made their own dedicated Rust teams. so far, this has been good for the ecosystem as they continue to contribute to the community but i know there's a lot of community members that feel uneasy about those moves. here's to hoping the worries amount to nothing :)

dwmbt2• 4 years ago

first time i've seen practical wasm system design and the transition written about. that being said, i would really love a deeper dive. the graphics were also insightful -- cheers, alexandru

pacificat0r4• 4 years ago

I'd actually love to do a more in-depth presentation of the internals and how stuff works together. Who knows, maybe in a future post :)

If you have any specific question, I could try to answer it here.

RcouF1uZ4gsC• 4 years ago

Language success is in large parts driven by what system adopts that language.

Objective-C’s success was driven by iOS.

C’s success was driven by Unix.

C++’s early success was driven in large part by 90’s GUI frameworks ( MDC, OWL, Qt, etc.

I think Wasm is shaping up to be huge in that you can safely run, high performance code across multiple operating systems/CPU’s. Of all the languages, I think Rust has the best WASM tooling, and the 2020’s may end up being the WASM/Rust decade.

nojito• 4 years ago

I think Rust has the best WASM tooling, and the 2020’s may end up being the WASM/Rust decade.

Still pales in comparison to .NET

miohtama• 4 years ago

Look to the future, not to the past.

ummonk• 4 years ago

On the one hand the proliferation of features such as WebGL, WebRTC, WASM, etc. greatly increases browser attack surfaces. On the other hand, it allows a single relatively constrained system to focus on for security hardening / sandboxing.

Regardless, being open standards, not obnoxiously object oriented, and better designed to interoperate with normal HTML content, the modern HTML5 ecosystem is certainly way more promising than Java applets / Flash / Silverlight.

Shadonototra• 4 years ago

I think Rust has the best WASM

Nope, C/C++ has, emscripten remains undefeated

You don't just put a name and expect things to skyroket

C++/Go/C# has more chance to become the standard toolkit for WASM than rust

rust problem, is people promotes more the "rust"™ rather than their project, the crabs definitely shadows them, it's unfortunate

the_duke• 4 years ago

Your comment seems to rooted in your dislike of Rust, rather than provide any technical arguments.

The Rust tooling certainly was the best, no question. As the Mozilla WASM devs have moved on the WASM tooling has stagnated, sadly, and The C++ tooling has caught up.

Languages like C# and Go are inherently worse for WASM because they require GC and have big runtimes they have to bring along.

astrange4• 4 years ago

Objective-C’s success was driven by iOS.

Well, Objective-C is from 1984 and its major success was being cloned to make a programming language called Java.

xxs2• 4 years ago

While Obj-C had a massive influence to java, I'd not call it clone - even Java 0.9 is a lot better language than Obj-C of 2010 (or so). The saving grace of Obj-C - it could include normal C just like that.

DonHopkins2• 4 years ago

Java was a direct reaction to C++, not Objective C.

James Gosling's earlier object oriented PostScript based NeWS interpreter was a lot more like Objective C and Smalltalk than his later Java language was. (But I'm not going to mention the earlier abomination that was Gosling Emacs MockLisp. Oops!)

https://medium.com/@donhopkins/bill-joys-law-2-year-1984-mil...

Bill Joy’s Law: 2^(Year-1984) Million Instructions per Second
The peak computer speed doubles each year and thus is given by a simple function of time. Specifically, S = 2^(Year-1984), in which S is the peak computer speed attained during each year, expressed in MIPS. -Wikipedia, Joy’s law (computing)
Introduction: These are some highlights from a prescient talk by Bill Joy in February of 1991.
“It’s vintage wnj. When assessing wnj-speak, remember Eric Schmidt’s comment that Bill is almost always qualitatively right, but the time scale is sometimes wrong.” -David Hough
C++++-=: “C++++-= is the new language that is a little more than C++ and a lot less.” -Bill Joy
In this talk from 1991, Bill Joy predicts a new hypothetical language that he calls “C++++-=”, which adds some things to C++, and takes away some other things.
Oak: It’s no co-incidence that in 1991, James Gosling started developing a programming language called Oak, which later evolved into Java.
“Java is C++ without the guns, knives, and clubs.” -James Gosling
Fortunately James had the sense to name his language after the tree growing outside his office window, instead of calling it “C++++-=”. (Bill and James also have very different tastes in text editors, too!)
[...]

zlei• 4 years ago

Just curious: which specific wasm VM implementation are they using?

johncolanduoni• 4 years ago

They mentioned joining the Bytecode Alliance, so probably wasmtime.

pacificat0r4• 4 years ago

It's actually Web assembly micro runtime (still from bytecode alliance but it's a vm that also supports interpreted mode)

jeffbee3• 4 years ago

Prime video has unbelievably bad performance on LG WebOS, and it’s not the platform because Hulu, Netflix, Disney, YouTube are all fine. If this is new and makes their app work acceptably, then great!

Just checked and Prime using 90MB in my TV, while YouTube uses 214KB, so maybe I already have the wasm monstrosity.

Commodore63• 4 years ago

Prime might maintain more of an asset cache than YT does.

jeffbee3• 4 years ago

Maybe it shouldn't?

I feel like the problems with their app are more algorithmic than in the implementation details. I once had to go edit my watchlist on amazon.com because I had added enough movies that whatever super-linear algorithm they were using simply could not comprehend my watchlist and the input watchdog timer would murder the app. And come to think of it that was when I used Prime on a Roku, so it's a cross-platform problem (yay, WASM!).

jozzy-james• 4 years ago

haven't noticed any performance issues on mine (edit: relative to other apps in that ecosystem) - tho is a newer model. the UHD for in-house productions is pretty darn atrocious tho (looking at you, goliath)

edit: HDR, not UHD...tho have only noticed it predominate on their originals vs purchases.

random_ind_dude2• 4 years ago

I have an LG UHD TV model from 2020 running webOS and I haven't noticed any performance issues either with Prime Video, UHD, HDR or otherwise. I use Bluetooth speakers/earphones for audio. The sound is almost perfectly synced with the video in Prime while there is a noticeably annoying delay in the Netflix app on the same TV.

laurencerowe• 4 years ago

While app the performance is just poor on my 2019 LG OLED TV I find HDR content to be unwatchable on it, seemingly a long running problem across multiple platforms: https://www.amazonforum.com/s/question/0D54P00007HLPkoSAH/le...

HDR content is somewhat better when played through the Prime Video PS5 app, though it still seems much darker than HDR content played on the Netflix/AppleTV/HBO LGTV apps.

gjsman-10005• 4 years ago

It's not just HDR content. I was watching a 2008 BBC drama called Little Dorrit on a Roku in 1080p streaming, no HDR because that didn't exist when it was filmed. It was super smeary, had terrible blacks, tons of obvious banding artifacts, it was really bad.

I bought the 1080p Blu-Ray version from the UK, and even my parents standing 10 feet away from our 48" 1080p TV (without me explaining the problems with the Prime version) could tell the difference after about 10 seconds.

perryizgr8• 4 years ago

Oh man I'm kind of happy to know that other people have this HDR problem too. Why don't apps and TVs just provide a simple toggle to turn it off? Why must it be automatic and non user selectable? Just give me the normal color stream!

bick_nyers• 4 years ago

I found most LG WebOS apps to have issues of some kind. A quick Google search tells me that they finally now have an HBO Max app, but that was a major issue for the longest time for me. I got a Google stick instead.

oofbey• 4 years ago

Why is this in their “science” blog?

Sunspark6• 4 years ago

Why don't apps like this leverage gpu hardware acceleration?

On my old tablet, Netflix runs a-ok, the media player has hardware acceleration and runs a-ok, but Amazon Prime stutters.

I haven't checked it in years, so maybe it is better now, but I am skeptical this is the case, because if the original creators of the Android app didn't think hardware accelerated video might be a nice idea, why would it be different now? This is a structural issue.

lathiat• 4 years ago

There is a cross sectional problem between what codecs that specific hardware supports (and generally is supported by all the popular devices), how much bandwidth you have on your connection and how many different codecs the various streaming services can support and cache locally.

There are trade offs to be made.

shmerl4• 4 years ago

Didn't everyone agree to align on AV1? So that should become a non issue as its adoption progresses.

Sunspark6• 4 years ago

Fair, but in this case I think the tablet should be usable. Sure it's old and only a dual-core cpu, but checking the list of hardware accelerated qualcomm decoder codecs it supports, it lists: vc1, divx, divx311, divx4, avc, mpeg2, mpeg4, h263.

Surely AVC which is h.264 should still be supported..

Maybe it gets tripped up trying to use the software google decoder codecs instead?

That said, I am not able to test it anymore. The tablet is on kitkat and I'm not able today to find a site hosting a minsdk older than lollipop. It's not a big deal, but it's disappointing to see apks for services that used to work just disappear. They always gobble on about "security". Why is it a problem for everyone else except Netflix? Netflix loves supporting devices.

ec1096852• 4 years ago

What was the reason for web assembly versus just running rust directly on the target hardware? Is the idea that the constrained WASM environment requires less QA than if the hardware was targeted specifically by the rust compiler?

exdsq3• 4 years ago

If you target a WASM VM you’re not tied into Rust itself which seems appealing from a risk standpoint

root_axis6• 4 years ago

How so? Your source code is still in Rust so seems like you'd still be tied to it.

jedisct12• 4 years ago

ELF, COFF, Mach-O, etc. objects can already be linked together regardless of the compiler producing them.

aylmao• 4 years ago

It's an alternative that gives them the updatability of JS. When they describe their original (JS/C++) architecture they mention this as a motivating factor:

This architecture split allows us to deliver new features and bug fixes without having to go through the very slow process of updating the C++ layer. The downloadable code is delivered through a fully automated continuous integration and delivery pipeline that can release updates as often as every few hours

They do support a lot of device types, which means a lot of compilation to produce many different binaries and probably more reliance on the app update systems of third parties.

AmyNever• 4 years ago

probably more reliance on the app update systems of third parties.

Exactly right. Big platforms with guaranteed support is one thing, but here's the situation for smart TVs right now:

It's 2022. You build an app for SuperScreen's latest range of smart TV. You update it every so often, and SuperScreen are happy to certify those updates and help you push them.

It's 2023. You port your app to SuperScreen's latest range of smart TVs. You keep updating your 2022 app, but SuperScreen are slightly less helpful now, as most of their attention is focused on the 2023 set (and upcoming 2024 range).

It's 2024. You port your app to SuperScreen's latest range of smart TVs. But when you want to update your 2022 app, SuperScreen say "hmm, we don't really have a lot of time now to certify apps for these older devices, please try to make as few updates as possible". It's a little tough but you have to do it, as the alternative is that 2022 TVs don't get any of your new features.

It's 2025. You port your app to SuperScreen's latest range of smart TVs. But now SuperScreen refuse to certify updates to your 2022 app saying "these are legacy devices and we can't justify the time or effort to certify apps on this platform any longer... unless you were to pay us a LOT of money".

You might get approval for one last update, paying SuperScreen the money, and then you effectively mothball your 2022 app. It becomes a "legacy" app for you as well, stuck in maintenance mode, not getting any updates or new features. And this is on a TV that is only four years old. So the best way forward is to make your native layer as small and light as possible, and shift all of the heavy lifting into the runtime client layer. If most of your client UI is a downloadable JS / WASM runtime, then you can keep supporting it even if the platform owners don't want to play ball any more.

gjsman-10005• 4 years ago

Personally, to me, whenever I read these stories about how Amazon is doing this novel use of WebAssembly, or how Uber is doing ludicrous engineering effort to keep their React-based app under 300MB for the App Store, I can't help but think:

"Man, that's an awful lot of work to avoid writing a native app."

Kaedon• 4 years ago

The challenge would be that Prime Video is distributed on many client devices. Here’s a list of a few TV OSes: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_smart_TV_platforms. How would you manage a different native app for each of them?

Caveat: previously worked at Prime Video though not in this area, still at Amazon

gjsman-10005• 4 years ago

I could be incorrect, but last time I did some reverse-engineering, Netflix had a Qt application that used native C++ bindings to knock out huge sections of that list.

That Qt application was only lightly modified for each platform, IIRC, and it appeared all over the place from those cheap Linux-based Blu-ray players to Smart TV clients. Anywhere that was embedded, generally Linux-based, and unlikely to get frequent updates.

As for some of the larger players like Roku or Android, those ones are more obvious where to hire. Java developers and BrightScript developers.

hashimotonomora• 4 years ago

It’s all about deployability.

systemvoltage• 4 years ago

I love native apps. But on the scale of Amazon (and having to compete with Netflix), slightest bit of friction, in this case downloading and installing an app, accepting permissions, etc takes a minute or two. It would be absolutely catastrophic to their competitiveness. You need to think more broadly on scale.

gjsman-10005• 4 years ago

If you read the original article, the use of WebAssembly is mainly across a broad array of device types where it will be packaged into an app. That app will require installation, accepting permissions, and all of that just like a native app.

The point is moot except for anyone watching Prime Video in the web browser.

nikki93• 4 years ago

You can render OpenGL with C++ and compile it to Wasm but alsk have it build and run natively (Emscripten or your own bindings or whatever). So this can be a way to do both, while keeping the reach of web. Depends on what kind of application you're building and whether this makes sense for that, for sure.

twelvechairs• 4 years ago

Writing a native app for every conceivable platform someone might want to watch Prime Video on seems an awful lot of work

titzer5• 4 years ago

"But why, though?" I keep asking myself, from a "how many darn buttons and doodads does it really need to have?" perspective. I suspect the issue is that people write entirely too much dang code to solve what is, after all, a fairly simple UI problem [1]. I mean, seriously. The Alto had less than a megabyte of RAM and managed to invent the GUI--menus, mouse, all. How have we managed to make this harder in 40 years?

[1]...until Branding(tm) enters the chat.

hn_throwaway_693• 4 years ago

A company that makes an awful lot of money can afford to not make an awful app on major platforms.

A native app on Windows, macOS, iOS and Android (TV), and some other solution for other platforms, isn't an unreasonable ask in this context.

jimbob45• 4 years ago

In this world where the only real differences between streaming services are their apps and their catalogues, you’d think everyone would be doing everything in their power to acquire every advantage on those fronts.

My own strategy would be to keep the generic electron version and then make a native app for the top 5 most popular TV models but that’s just me.

BatteryMountain2• 4 years ago

No. You just build one abstraction and then use a code generator to build a client for different targets. So as long as you have good developers with an interest in code generation and that will stick around for a few years to maintain the generators, then it works out fine. Resist the temptation to create a new DSL or programming language. Pick a language with a strict compiler, good typing system and good reflection capabilities and you are good to go. Ideally you code your app/abstraction once and then then everything else gets generated automatically by some build pipeline.

kuschku• 4 years ago

In the pre-streaming era, every platform had a native player and content library app that worked fine.

If streaming services desire to replace local playback, they’ll also have to replace the convenience that provided.

lukasb• 4 years ago

Native apps are harder to update: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30110265

ihuman• 4 years ago

The Uber app is naive, not React

https://eng.uber.com/how-uber-deals-with-large-ios-app-size/

staticassertion• 4 years ago

I hope native apps die. Most companies won't put in the level of effort into their engineering that the Chrome/Firefox teams do - specifically, they're not going to take security as seriously.

imwillofficial2• 4 years ago

That… escalated quickly

ad-astra4• 4 years ago

Agreed! Why write a native app when you can just use Babel to transpile to Google Sheets formulas? Sure it doesn’t support threading but modern devices are so fast nowadays it doesn’t even matter.

madrox• 4 years ago

Between electron, webassembly, and other technologies, I don't think the line between web app and native app is as clear as it used to be, especially relative lift and performance. In the end, the only difference may be "one is launched in a browser and one is launched from the start menu"

blacklion• 4 years ago

It is very clear: are ALL controls which could be standard (provided by native OS toolkit) really standard (and respect system theming, customization, etc) and are ALL keyboard shortucts and other behaviors of OS standard toolkit supported? I don't care are code is native (as in compiled ahead of time / just in time / interpreted), but I'm care for behaviors and it consistency, both across one app and whole system.

I'm forced to use Slack at $job, and it is awful, for example. Some text fields looks as text fields and are used as text fields, but don't respect "Shift+End/Home/Arrows" keyboard commands. Other does. It is annoying as hell. It is Electron.

Even more «native» toolkits, like GTK and QT are have small discrepancies. Simple example: my Windows has English MUI (interface language) but Russian locale (time and date format, etc). In POSIX terms it is something like LC_MESSAGES=en_GB & LC_ALL=ru_RU (according to POSIX more specific categories have priority over LC_ALL). 95% of both QT-based and GTK-based software with translation to Russian speak Russian to me (and if I'm lucky has setting somewhere to enforce English). They think that «(system language)» is Russian. But it is not! It is not very «native», IMHO. Ok, GTK-based software is typicality build via cygwin/mingw, so it is really not very native and is «hacked» to run on Windows, but most of QT-based software IS build for Windows, as Windows is fully supported, tier 1 platform for QT. But still.

If I start to write down all small nitpicks about cross-platform software, which shows that it it not native, I could find many in any cross-platform software. Corner cases in keyboard shortcuts, non-copyable messageboxes, strange tab behaviors, non-standard open/save/print dialogs, etc, etc, etc. If you use platform for 25+ years (yes, Windows changed a lot from 3.11 for Workgroups which was my first version, but these changes were small ones, step-by-step, and A LOT of things in UX didn't change still!), you have a shitton of muscle memory and all these nitpicks throw you off.

Yes, I know, that there is no "native" toolkit for Linux. IMHO, it is a big problem, much bigger, that all problems of X11 which Wayland want to solve.

kmeisthax• 4 years ago

Uber is a bad example because they need to have support for literally every payment method on the planet. And all of that needs to be preloaded ahead of time just in case the user decides they're going to fly to Mumbai tomorrow. Their app absolutely needs to be bloated or it won't work at all.

Likewise, Amazon needs to run on all sorts of different smart TV platforms, not just iOS and Android. All of those apps need to be consistent to each other, rather than to their host platforms. That's almost the textbook case for using a cross-platform framework.

ksec3• 4 years ago

And all of that needs to be preloaded ahead of time just in case the user decides they're going to fly to Mumbai tomorrow.

This is Interesting. So essentially Uber is a "Global" App by default?

littlestymaar• 4 years ago

Uber is a bad example because they need to have support for literally every payment method on the planet.

How is the breadth of their payment back-end and excuse for a bloated client?

saagarjha4• 4 years ago

Their app absolutely needs to be bloated or it won't work at all.

It really doesn’t. I remember this being brought up back when the Uber engineer crying about how their compiler couldn’t match their scale was making the rounds, and in the end the numbers just did not add up to support the app size they have right now.

All of those apps need to be consistent to each other, rather than to their host platforms.

Why? Platform-specific apps, for the most part, should feel at home on their platforms. Not doing this is how you get YouTube for Apple TV and similarly bad apps.

shroompasta5• 4 years ago

I disagree with this perspective.

From a startup pov, going with native apps will require multiple teams (Usually just Android + iOS, but occasionally Windows as well)

React Native will only require one team, or just one engineer depending on the size of the project

Better yet, If your front end developer is fluent in React(web), then that developer is already fluent in React Native.

I completely disagree on the "awful lot of work", when you could literally get your FE developer to work on your "native" apps.

Sure, where performance must be squeezed, it's probably optimal to go native, but that bar is set a lot lower than where it actually should be.

If React Native is good enough for Discord, it's good for 3 quarters of all apps out there.

ad-astra4• 4 years ago

Former Dev that did Web -> Ionic -> RN -> Native iOS over the course of 6 years speaking here.

- Web devs typically don’t have strong instincts for mobile apps, they require more mentorship & onboarding time.

- Animation and interactivity is strongly limited in RN - You’re always so many levels removed from the actual APIs being used. For example, using UIKit and CoreAnimation are absolutely amazing and super lightweight on CPU/GPU in comparison. UICollectionView is a modern miracle that offers so much more control than FlatList.

- JS/Babel/node_modules is hell, no I won’t elaborate.

- Multi-threading, priority/concurrent queues etc for maintaining good all-around perf while doing intense operations is very strong with native platforms. RN just has sophisticated band-aids.

Honestly it mostly depends on the type of work the app will be doing, the dev resources available to you, and the level of quality you want to attain. I strive to create the best of the best user experience, and native is the best way to attain that.

The app I work on still uses RN for some features, but the results historically have been disappointing on average.

Happy coding!

mrtksn• 4 years ago

HTML+JS+CSS is a very refined toolset for building UI that provides you with a content to consume. Sometimes, especially when the content is text, video and images, it’s actually easier to build high quality experience that works very well on all the platforms because it provides interaction modes out of the box that are the same everywhere.

Native apps shine when you do something novel, something that’s beyond text, images and video consumption or you leverage platform specific functions.

IMHO, sticking to Web technologies is a better option for things like Netflix or Amazon Prime but not good for Uber and alike.

Cthulhu_2• 4 years ago

For web & phones, I'm inclined to agree; a native app outperforms a web or hybrid app any day of the week. I do believe Facebook and Google are companies who ran into limitations though, binary size, number of classes / identifiers, build times, for which using web technology was a solution.

But for TVs, ehh. There's a lot more fragmentation on the TV market. And if things were slightly different, we'd have a lot more fragmentation on the mobile market as well. Actually there are plenty of mobile alternatives, but developers don't really want to support all operating systems - and these cross-platform tools often have substandard support for mobile operating systems that aren't iOS or Android.

pornel• 4 years ago

The egui framework they mention is pretty neat:

https://emilk.github.io/egui/

It an entirely custom toolkit, so don't expect it to have a native look and feel, but it's a GPU-first design with multiple back-ends. It can be used in native OpenGL apps too. It's an immediate-mode UI, so it's very easy to build and update even complex windows. Great choice if you want to prototype a game.

FpUser• 4 years ago

Checked demo. Bugs when interacting. For example when clicking buttons on top does not switch to supposed part. just flushes screen momentarily. Clicking refresh on browser right after that fixes the situation.

Major pita is keyboard handling when selecting, cutting, pasting text in edit controls and markup editor

rafale3• 4 years ago

Immediate mode is such an outdated approach for a modern UI framework. It's a deal-breaker imo.

coldtea6• 4 years ago

Immediate vs retained is not about "modern" vs "outdated", both are about as old as computer graphics themselves. One is better in some cases, the other in others.

In any case, the fashion (for the last ~10 years) is to consider immediate mode the modern approach, and retained mode an awkward practice of the 90s. So you can call "immediate mode" a lot, but you can't call it "outdated" when most consider it the new black...

throw140820202• 4 years ago

we built an application that overlays debugger information on an application scene render using egui, a Rust GUI library

This is the context. They use egui to display debugger information - performance does not matter for the debugger information.

IshKebab5• 4 years ago

It does if you're debugging performance issues.

Beltalowda3• 4 years ago

The biggest downside of this is that everything is painted as "graphics", and you can no longer use the web inspector to modify the fonts, colours, etc.

While few people (like myself) do this directly, lots of people use it indirectly through extensions like Adblock, Stylus, etc.

For example, I find the fonts hard to read due to the colour choices; then I zoom in and it's better, but now this "Widget gallery" no longer fits on my screen and there is no scrollbar.

franga2000• 4 years ago

Yes, I really hope this doesn't become common. By not utilising the DOM, you're killing accessibility, autofill, customization (things like reader mode, automatic dark themes...)... These are things that regular people rely on every day (not just us techies writing userscript a and Stylus themes).

dspillett• 4 years ago

extensions like Adblock

I suspect that if Amazon have considered this, they certainly didn't see it as a disadvantage!

lordnacho• 4 years ago

Can confirm this lib is very good. I use it to simplify my status app, it allows me to keep everything in Rust so that I don't need to know too much about react and other web tech.

There's demo apps that you can just grab and edit to your liking, and the docs explain what you need to build the WASM app and run it.

agumonkey• 4 years ago

someone made a tutorial to make a web app in rust with egui https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4MKcqR9z8AU

f00zz• 4 years ago

Cool. Looks like a fancier version of Dear ImGui.

malermeister• 4 years ago

Is the font rendering awful for anyone else? Firefox on Windows fwiw

TruthWillHurt• 4 years ago

Prime Video app sucks. Spend less time over-optimizing, more time improving usability.

myko• 4 years ago

It is the worst of the major streaming apps. It's very slow and has lots of loading/reloading on every piece of hardware I've used it on (Android phone, iPad, AppleTV, AndroidTV).

I imagine the other streaming apps use similar techniques to share code, so I wonder why theirs is so poor in this regard.

Outside of the major players though it gets a lot worse - Funimation's streaming app is horrendous, as is Crunchyroll's. At least Prime Video is doing better than that tier.

lostgame• 4 years ago

But Amazon is one of the largest companies in the world - Crunchyroll has an excuse. Amazon doesn’t.

My girlfriend’s smart TV runs WebOS and if we have to use Prime for some reason it’s easier to plug the laptop in via HDMI and do it via a browser. Amazon’s app seems to just be broken on WebOS there.

Not only that, but what the heck is up with the completely uninspired UI and user-hostile UX? The importance of seasons being lumped together is something a focus group should have noticed.

Amazon was a web-first company - you really have to wonder how they screwed up their user experience so, so badly.

maeln• 4 years ago

I cannot believe how Amazon is one of the biggest company on the planet and still cannot seem to figure out UI/UX for any of their product. Amazon (the website) having an awful UX might be "by design" (i.e dark patterns) but it make no sense for Amazon Video, AWS dashboard, the kindle/device side of the Amazon website, ...

shime• 4 years ago

Do they even employ UI/UX designers? AWS dashboard doesn't look designed to me.

AtlasBarfed• 4 years ago

Have you seen the AWS UI?

Or the AWS API?

I actually think this is a product of Amazon's workplace culture. The old joke about the first 90% taking 90% of the time and the last 10% takes the other 90% of the time. Amazon only invests in the first 90%, and doesn't give a shit about the rest of it because they have already won the monopoly, and their sociopathic stack ranking forced firing culture won't reward people working on polish.

In UIs, that second 90% is polish. Polish comes from low priority ticket/feature fulfillment, and if you're working on low priority tickets, that means you're getting fired in the next reaper cycle.

rustworld• 4 years ago

Really interesting to see the adoption. Disney+ Shared the following: https://medium.com/disney-streaming/introducing-the-disney-a...

sheeshkebab• 4 years ago

Now I know why Prime video app sucks on every iOS device I tried it on, including Apple TV

alx__• 4 years ago

Disney+ uses WASM and feels like it has less "suck". Prime just seems to lack some UX polish.

jackson1442• 4 years ago

I've never had a problem with the functionality of Prime Video across any apple/webOS devices.

The UI, however, is easily the worst of any streaming platform. Why is a search result returned for each individual season of a TV series? Why doesn't it follow ANY of the Apple TV UI conventions?

But somehow it's more reliable than Netflix, Hulu, and HBO Max (hbo isn't that high of a bar though).

lucb1e2• 4 years ago

Don't forget that every single button in the UI lags.

Start an episode, pause immediately because you just realized you forgot something in the kitchen? Oops now you disabled subtitles because that UI button was still busy popping up (and subtitles are necessary to understand their whispers without being DEAFENED BY LOUD SCENES without adjusting volume by 50% every 2 minutes).

Want to hide the UI because you just finished navigating the menus to re-enable those subtitles and hit the back button? Oops now you go back to the main overview because the first click did register, it just took a minute for the TV to respond and now your second click takes you back. Now have fun scrolling down five rows three columns to find the thing you were watching 1 second ago and do this dance again.

This is not helped by LG shipping a CPU literally slower than a raspberry pi's in a €550 2019 TV, but other apps do not have this problem. It's too bad Prime has some exclusives like The Expanse, I look forward to finishing the couple series we had in the queue and cancelling Prime again.

curiousgal• 4 years ago

And yet they can't even implement Picture-in-Picture mode on their Android app. A basic feature has been stable for years among any app that plays videos.

Not to mention that their show recommendations are the worst ever, I would be ashamed to be part of their ML team honestly. (For reference I'm an American/North African woman staying in France and all of my recommendations are for Indian action movies, literally all of them. I've never seen a single Bollywood film ever.)

Anyway this is to say, technical innovation won't undo the damage done by shitty product managers.

chj• 4 years ago

On systems such as iOS which you don't have JIT, performance is going to be real bad, as if you are dancing with a pair of iron made shoes. Honestly Amazon should afford going full native, at least for the scene and animation stuff.

beardedman2• 4 years ago

I really wouldn't use Amazon Prime as a shining example of WA.

colesantiago• 4 years ago

why not? so they aren't using webassembly correctly? who is a better example and why?

beardedman2• 4 years ago

I use it on web/AppleTV/FireTV & IMO it doesn't have a great user experience on any platform. Generally it's a bit jerky/laggy & also often gets glitchy (on FireTV at least) post very long running videos. I'm not saying it sucks, but the apps for Disney & Netlix feel so much better to use. My comment wasn't directed at WebAssembly.

karmasimida• 4 years ago

It is painfully slow comparing with its competitors, and for no good reason to be so.

Overall it has the shittiest experience, also thanks to the monstrosity that is X-ray.

At the best, this article can only say Prime Video would be more shitty without WASM maybe?

bluehex• 4 years ago

Would this architecture work on their iOS app as well even with Apple's restrictions on downloading executable code?

Jyaif• 4 years ago

You can run WebAssembly in a WKWebview, which wouldn't break any Apple restriction.

formerly_proven• 4 years ago

Prime Video
xyz [4K/UHD]

4K is not available when using a computer

HD is not available because you're not using Windows

when using Windows

HD is not available because you don't have HDCP

Graphics driver begs to differ.

Prime SD is usually somewhere between 240p and 320p, HD looks like a decently encoded 720p file. Never seen it but I'm guessing 4K might actually approach the quality of a 2007 Blu-Ray.

verytrivial• 4 years ago

I saw these errors the one time I tried Prime Video and laughed out loud, and ended the trial on the spot. It was like being turned away by a bouncer from a awful looking bar because they didn't like your shoes. Thus ends our relationship!

chaosite2• 4 years ago

Prime 4K's bit-rate is ~15Mb/s. A UHD Blu-Ray has a bit-rate that's more like 70Mb/s, and a 1080p Blu-ray has a bit-rate of ~28Mb/s. Of course, 4K is usually encoded with H.265 while 1080p is encoded with H.264, so the raw bit-rate numbers are not as useful for comparison - but still, that's almost twice the bit-rate for a quarter of the pixels, and H.265 isn't magic.

sharken2• 4 years ago

Prime 4K is nice, but if you have a decent sound system with Atmos, then Amazon Prime is not the place.

Apple TV has been the best platform so far for 4K and Atmos content, if you also want an option to purchase a title.

https://www.highdefdigest.com/news/show/everything-on-amazon...

thinkingemote• 4 years ago

Their android app on a tablet is even worse video quality than on a desktop.

alvarlagerlof• 4 years ago

The prime video website doesn't seem to go higher than 480p. YouTube trailers for their own shows look vastly better.

austincheney• 4 years ago

Sounds like they are doing it wrong.

Our Wasm investigations started in August 2020, when we built some prototypes to compare the performance of Wasm VMs and JavaScript VMs in simulations involving the type of work our low-level JavaScript components were doing. In those experiments, code written in Rust and compiled to Wasm was 10 to 25 times as fast as JavaScript.

For video processing, especially high fidelity, high frequency, and high resolution video, I can see WASM crushing JavaScript performance by orders of magnitude. But, that isn’t this. They are just launching an app.

I have verified in my own personal application that I can achieve superior performance and response times in a GUI compared to nearly identical interfaces provided by the OS on the desktop.

There are some caveats though.

First, rendering in the browser is offloaded to the GPU so performance improvements attributed to interfaces in the browser are largely a reflection of proper hardware configurations on new hardware. The better the hardware the better a browser interface can perform compared to a desktop equivalent and I suspect the inverse to also be true.

Second, performance improvements in the browser apply only up to a threshold. In my performance testing on my best hardware that threshold is somewhere between 30000 to 50000 nodes rendered from a single instance. I am not a hardware guy but I suspect this could be due to a combination of JavaScript being single threaded and memory allocation designed for speed in a garbage collected logical VM opposed to allocated for efficiency.

Third, the developers actually have to know what they are doing. This is the most important factor for performance and all the hardware improvements in the world won’t compensate. There are two APIs to render any interface in the browser: canvas and the DOM. Each have different limitations. The primary interface is the DOM which is more memory intense but requires far less from the CPU/GPU, so the DOM can scale to a higher quantity of nodes without breaking a sweat but without cool stuff like animation.

There are only a few ways to modify the DOM. Most performance variations come from reading the DOM. In most cases, but not all, the fastest access comes from the old static methods like getElementById, getElementsByTagName, and getElementsByClassName. Other access approaches are faster only when there is not a static method equivalent, such as querying elements by attribute.

The most common and preferred means of DOM access are querySelectors which are incredibly slow. The performance difference can be as large as 250,000x in Firefox. Modern frameworks tend to make this slower by supplying additional layers of abstraction and unnecessarily executing querySelectors with unnecessary repetition.

Zenst• 4 years ago

I'd be happy with surround (5.1) upon windows, alas it seems you can only get that via an Amazon device. HD 5.1 would suit me over any 4k and do feel many streaming services use the 4k etc as marketing more than anything else and fail upon the audio aspect in regards to surround, which IMHO add's way more to the viewing experience than a bump in resolution - though others millage may vary.

Prime Video Uses WebAssembly

Related Stories