Amazon Fire TV - <AUTHOR> http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00CX5P8FC/ref=tsm_1_tw_s_kin_n3er02 <comment><USER2> This is pretty much what Google TV should have been all along, but Google cares too much about web search and not enough about what people actually want to do on a TV - watch shows and play games.

The gaming aspect of this will make it a winner. OUYA's big problem is that it didn't do streaming and was a bit clunky. Amazon has a big game library and just needs controller support.

As a parent, a $100 streaming box and game console that has cheap/free games is very appealing.

As a developer, the economics of game development for such a console is not so great, but maybe IAP would make it worthwhile.

<comment><USER3> It's interesting how different perspectives work:

> The gaming aspect of this will make it a winner. OUYA's big problem is that > it didn't do streaming and was a bit clunky. Amazon has a big game library > and just needs controller support.

I think the gaming aspects are the worst part and are entirely useless. Who wants to casual game with an underpowered box on a giant TV screen? Goofy games are fun on a 4-7" screen because expectations are low. On my TV I expect a crazy immersive experience, not "Candy Crush".

Perhaps they would have been better served by spending their time getting HBO- Go, Starz/Encore and Spotify all hooked into their little box. If they want to be the central hub for all things "media" and want to compel people to move off of their existing platform ( Roku and ATV ) it seems like they need to offer a more complete package.

<comment><USER4> > Who wants to casual game with an underpowered box on a giant TV screen?

Over 100 million Nintendo Wii consoles were sold. Now, we can bicker about how many of those buyers were into casual games or not, but regardless:

The market exists.

<comment><USER5> comparing Wii games to phone games is a bit of a stretch. They might be more casual than xbox and ps4, but they are far bigger and better than than phone games. Mario, zelda, candy crush, which one of these is not like the others.

<comment><USER4> Wii didn't just sell Mario games though, it also sold a plethora of carnival games and the like. I mean, the bundled title was Wii Sports, and they made huge splashes with Wii Fit and Wii Music.

And meanwhile, there are phone games that _are_ comparable to the big headline titles of the Wii etc - Bard's Tale, Oil Rush, GTA, etc.

If Amazon pushes the gamepad hard for the Fire TV, we could definitely see it in that space.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm really not that impressed. This is just Apple TV for the Amazon eco-system with gaming lopped on. The majority of people don't care about the specs of their set-top box since that really doesn't affect the performance of streaming an HD video in this day and age. So the two differentiating features are:

\- Voice Search

\- Gaming

Are those enough of a value proposition? Probably not to make converts. I suspect the main buyers will be those who simply have bought into Amazon Instant Video as opposed to iTunes in the past. Let's see what Apple's next revision of Apple TV offers.

<comment><USER7> > This is just Apple TV for the Amazon eco-system with gaming lopped on.

I hate the word "just". The iPad is "just" a big iPod Touch. The new feature the client wants is "just" a simple checkbox. Etc.

Not only does that single word abstract away hundreds of person-years of work; it ignores the fact that products often gain market traction despite being "just" $existingThing + $minorChange, whether by reaching a tipping point of quality and experience, or through other intangibles like ecosystem, name recognition and marketing.

I love my AppleTV (mostly), but I'm keeping an eye on this thing (hopefully its software is higher quality than the Fire tablets).

<comment><USER8> I understand your gripe you just made with the word "just" and I'm not the OP.

I had a friend excitedly text me about this today so I looked it up. On the device's page [1] there is a 'compare to xyz' box they literally place 3 other devices that have existed for a while now and looking through this, it appears to me to be "just" amazon's attempt to get into this space without providing a lot of additional value.

Looking at the list they provide there each of the devices provide all the functionality I personally would ever want in a streaming hardware solution. They have "just" provided Apple TV for Amazon, they have not extended the paradigm as far as I can see.

[1] [http://www.amazon.com/Amazon-CL1130-Fire- TV/dp/B00CX5P8FC](http://www.amazon.com/Amazon-CL1130-Fire-TV/dp/B00CX5P8FC)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Fire TV supports standards like DIAL[1], so app developers can enable multi- screen experiences based on open technologies.[2]

[1] [http://www.dial-multiscreen.org/](http://www.dial-multiscreen.org/)

[2] [http://phx.corporate-ir.net/phoenix.zhtml?c=176060&p=irol- ne...](http://phx.corporate-ir.net/phoenix.zhtml?c=176060&p=irol- newsArticle&ID=1915168&highlight=)

</comment><comment><USER10> The side-by-side comparison with Roku/AppleTV actually looks pretty bad for Amazon Fire TV...

Same price, the only differences are that the Fire TV has voice search (don't care), a bunch of technical specs that the layperson doesn't care about, and a bunch of games (don't care). It's missing the checkbox for HBO GO (deal breaker for me personally).

I was expecting something like a monthly subscription for all-you-can-watch access to any TV show on Amazon Instant (not just the free Prime episodes). Kinda bummed because I really like Amazon as a content provider, but I'll be sticking with Roku for now.

<comment><USER11> Agreed, I own a roku and a chromecast, there is literally nothing here that makes me regret either, and nothing that would make me choose the Fire TV over AppleTV if I did want to be tied closer to one ecosystem.

I guess I'm bummed that it means it's unlikely the prime video interface will get any better on Roku, but Prime Instant video quality is already so much worse for me then any other source it's not that big a loss.

<comment><USER12> > and nothing that would make me choose the Fire TV over AppleTV if I did want > to be tied closer to one ecosystem.

Well, Amazon is at least available on a variety of platforms whereas iTunes is only on Apple devices -- and will always only be available on Apple devices.

<comment><USER13> Um what? These restrictions are everywhere, just a little different across platforms.

For example

\- All iTunes content is available on Mac, Windows & iOS devices, and all downloaded music is playable on all devices that support AAC. Apple doesn't offer a pure streaming service (AppleTV masquerades as one) so you're stuck with iOS, Windows, and Mac for purchased video content.

\- Google Play content can be streamed to any device with an app or modern browser (Linux requires Flash hacks), but can only be downloaded to Android devices. You can't download a movie to play offline on your PC, Mac or iOS device.

\- Amazon Instant Video is streamable to any device (Linux requires flash hacks) EXCEPT 3rd party Androids -- Amazon requires you to buy THEIR Android Kindle devices. Downloadable/offline content is only available on Windows.

\- Netflix is streamable to any device with an app (Linux requires silverlight hacks). There is no downloadable content.

<comment><USER12> You seem to be saying these restrictions are equivalent, but we're talking about video here, and iTunes is only available on Apple devices and Windows desktop (who wants to watch movies on a desktop computer anyways), whereas Amazon Instant is available on dozens of blu-ray players, smart TVs, set-top boxes, video game consoles that they do not control.

Let's be clear here, iTunes is never coming to any non-Apple device unless the company takes a radical departure from what it has been doing the past 10 years.

<comment><USER13> Apple is in the business of selling devices and having the most content available to encourage adoption (and doing a pretty good job of it). I don't give a toss that iTunes isn't available on a bunch of Smart TVs or BluRay players, I'm rarely going to buy another BluRay player or Smart TV, nor are most people, they're happy with the one they've currently got.

Amazon is in the content distribution business and playing catchup on having the devices to support it (because, for some reason, having their app on a smart TV and set top box doesn't seem to be enough).

This is a pretty good offering, but it's clear that, HuluPlus and Netflix aside, the big players [Google|Amazon|Apple] wants to have their own device ecosystem, and are fighting to differentiate theirs. For $99, these streaming devices are a disposable income purchase that gives you benefits in a particular ecosystem. Amazon has no particular advantage in this race yet, they're still coming from behind.

<comment><USER12> No, they do have the advantage of being available on a large number of platforms. This means I can buy a movie from Amazon and feel confident that in 2 years if I decide to buy a different TV, a different set-top box, a different video game console, a different tablet, I _probably_ (but of course not guaranteed) can still watch that movie on it.

That's like, a real advantage.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Amazon FreeTime (coming next month, according to this page) is the most interesting piece for me - customized child safety settings for each child, with monthly subscriptions at $2.99 for children's TV shows.

It seems like Amazon recognized the popularity of streaming services for parents of young kids and is setting this up just for them...

<comment><USER15> Kindle FreeTime Unlimited is available now. [http://www.amazon.com/gp/feature.html?&docId=1000863021](http://www.amazon.com/gp/feature.html?&docId=1000863021)

<comment><USER16> That is incredible. Makes me consider buying a Kindle Fire for my daughter (age 5) instead of letting her use a legacy iPad when my wife upgrades her iPad 2.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I know this is a nitpick...I really do, but for some reason things like this in marketing copy really annoy me:

"Remote with no line of sight required" \- not checked for Chromecast. While kind of true since Chromecast doesn't have a dedicated remote, but the devices used to control it absolutely don't require line of site.

<comment><USER18> I agree, you could say the same thing for voice search since you can use voice search on your iphone/android to queue up videos to airplay/cast.

<comment><USER19> Agree with both of you and also wanted to add, who cares about how much memory the Chromecast has vs. the other devices?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> This is a reasonable answer to Apple TV.

If you have videos on or subscriptions to iTunes, Netflix, and Amazon Prime (as I do), there's no box I'm aware of that will let you watch all three. So you end up using your Apple TV and then Roku or another box -- the Playstation 3 in my living room takes a long time to boot, and a long time to load the Netflix app, draws quite a bit of power, and is overkill for merely watching streaming video. The Amazon Fire TV, assuming it's fast enough, will add another device to my living room cabinet but make it a lot faster to switch to watching Amazon Prime videos.

Ideally Apple would allow Amazon to add Prime Streaming to the Apple TV box, or Roku would get the iTunes library. Then I could have an all-in-one box. But we all know that's not going to happen...

<comment><USER21> Apple TV lets you watch all three (iTunes, Netflix, and Amazon Prime).

Airplay is a thing.

<comment><USER22> So, the solution to the shortcomings of Apple devices is yet more Apple devices? Oh, ok.

<comment><USER21> Suspect many already have at least one Airplay capable device.

<comment><USER23> I suspect a majority of people don't.

<comment><USER24> I think only people with Apple devices buy Apple TVs. If they don't, I can see it being far less useful.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> They're studying the mistakes of others, and paying attention to user reviews of competing products, so they can solve real pain points:

> During its presentation, Amazon said that it has been paying close attention > to the complaints of customers who have been using the other companies' > devices through Amazon—namely that search is difficult, performance is > laggy, and the ecosystems are closed—in order to build its own streaming > device." [1]

For instance, what they're doing with the child-oriented mode is what I wish Apple had done with the iPad and iPhone, a long time ago.

[1] [http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2014/04/amazon-reveals- video-...](http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2014/04/amazon-reveals-video- streaming-box-fire-tv/)

<comment><USER25> That's pretty funny, as a long-time Roku user. The search couldn't be easier, whether you're inside a specific app, or using the cross platform search feature. Performance is snappier than these services on a desktop browser, and the ecosystem is as open as anyone could want.

<comment><USER26> As a long-time Roku user I curse ours almost every day. Performance is slower than every other device we own (except the Chromecast). They constantly "reset" themselves while trying to navigate through the Netflix and Amazon listings. Videos will just sporadically stop playing or run into constant buffering issues. There are no parental controls. They didn't support DLNA until a few months ago.

<comment><USER27> "long-time Roku user."

How old is your box? I'm still happy with mine, despite it being a couple of years old. I was thinking of getting a new one, but if the new ones are of poorer quality...

<comment><USER26> We own a Roku 2 XD and a Roku LT, both about 2.5 years old. Both worked great for ~ 6 months and then... something changed and they haven't worked well since.

I used to have one of the originals, it was great.

<comment><USER27> I did notice that the UI gets slower and less responsive, but I blame myself for being a cheapo and expecting a $70 box to last years.

I'm waiting a bit to see if the next RokuBox or AmazonBox ends up supporting iTunes videos (which is a nice to have, but not a must have.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> For me, AirPlay is the killer Apple TV feature. Any time a new app comes out for iOS that supports streaming video, I know I'm going to be able to play it on my television. The local content provider apps on the device don't really matter that much to me. I can even stream Amazon Prime video to my Apple TV, so I'm having a hard time seeing why I would want this instead of waiting for the next generation Apple TV.

<comment><USER9> FireTV supports Miracast according to the PR: Miracast according to Press Release:

You can also wirelessly mirror your tablet display to your Fire TV with Kindle Fire, as well as other Miracast-enabled phones or tablets starting later this year. Fire TV supports standards like DIAL, so app developers can enable multi-screen experiences based on open technologies.

[http://phx.corporate-ir.net/phoenix.zhtml?c=176060&p=irol- ne...](http://phx.corporate-ir.net/phoenix.zhtml?c=176060&p=irol- newsArticle&ID=1915168&highlight=)

<comment><USER28> Ah, this is one of the problems with isolated ecosystems, I guess. Until Apple opens up AirPlay (never), I'm stuck with whatever they give me. :/

<comment><USER12> The only way to get yourself out of the lock in is to stop buying their devices.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I think this will be huge.

It will only take one great game for this thing to pop. With a system that enough users will have in the living room someone is going to put together a fun free-to-play FPS and that will be enough for it to be the clear winner over AppleTV / Chromecast.

Voice search is a big deal if it works the way I think it does. TV is easy, everyone knows how to use one and how to find what they want to watch. Navigating between Netflix, Hulu, Instant, iTunes, Cruncyroll, NBC ... is a pain. Even on my AppleTV navigating Netflix alone is the worst.

</comment><comment><USER30> What I find most exciting is that this finally opens the doors for indie game developers to write games for the big screen.

It is true that Steam was already doing that, but I think the audience of people with a PC plugged to a TV screen in the living room or that owns a Steam box is not as big as what the Fire TV owners might end up being

<comment><USER31> > this finally opens the doors for indie game developers to write games for > the big screen

Sony has had extensive and widely-used support for indie game development for the PlayStation platforms for quite some time.[1]

Microsoft has has had so-so support for indie developers (choice between them essentially acting as your publisher or fending for yourself in the Xbox Live Indie Games wasteland), but they're trying to fix that with ID@Xbox.[2]

Then, of course, there's Ouya, if you're in to that sort of thing.[3] It's an Android platform too.

[1]: [http://us.playstation.com/develop/](http://us.playstation.com/develop/)

[2]: [http://www.xbox.com/en-us/Developers/id](http://www.xbox.com/en- us/Developers/id)

[3]: [https://www.ouya.tv](https://www.ouya.tv)

<comment><USER30> Everything you say is absolutely right.

What I meant to say however (and I apologize for the way I phrased it) is that this is makes it even easier for indie developers to reach a wide audience.

Not only do I expect that it will be fairly easy to port Android Tablet games to the Fire TV, I also think that the strategy of offering a TV box that has a Games marketplace as a bonus feature is a strategy that will allow Fire TVs to sell a lot more than Ouyas.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> I am kind of surprised the Roku manages to stay independent in all the 'tv' efforts. They have a really nice player and now a nice 'stick' player. Also a pretty easy to use SDK. So why re-build all or much of that for a proprietary box? Any thoughts on that strategy?

<comment><USER33> Roku, as I understand it, derives their revenue from hardware sales. So they have such an incentive to get you to upgrade hardware that they will actually take away content[1] in an effort to force you to do so.

My guess is Amazon is doing the opposite. They're probably practically giving away the hardware in hopes they'll realize more profits on the content you buy. And a device like this is just a small piece of a larger puzzle for Amazon and with their previous hardware experience its not a giant leap for them to produce a proprietary box.

For Roku, their device line _is_ the puzzle. So sure, they have an easy to use SDK[2] it is also proprietary. I'm guessing Amazon built the Fire TV on Android so new apps are really just Android apps.

[1]: They did this last year and as a result I will never buy another Roku product again.

[2]: I'm still dumbfounded that they based it on Visual Basic. Carl Sassenrath is an employee now. In my opinion they'd do well to scrap their existing VB- style SDK and base the next generation on Rebol.

<comment><USER34> Tut tut, _brightscript_ ;)

I looked into writing for Roku, cracked open some docs, and that was the end of that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> I was an early Ouya backer and was really really disappointed I sold it (like 1 month after I received it. This Amazon Fire TV may be what the Ouya was supposed to be, I mean I know it's more seen as a Roku/Apple TV competitor but for me if it runs Android then I can use it as a decent Emulation machine (RetroArch etc... )

I will buy one for sure

<comment><USER24> Why did you sell it?

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> So that answers my question of whether my Apple TV would ever get Amazon streaming.

<comment><USER37> Not necessarily, Roku, PS 3 & 4, Xbox 360 & One all have amazon streaming.

It probably has more to do with Apple than Amazon.

<comment><USER38> But other Android devices, weirdly, do not.

<comment><USER39> Slightly more weirdly, Google TV does have an Amazon Instant Video app. But non-TV Android does not. Well, Kindle. But non-TV Google-standard Android does not.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> What I'm taking away from this is that Fire TV is the same as Roku and Apple TV.

As for the gaming capabilities, it'll be interesting to see if they can compete with Steam Machine.

<comment><USER41> I don't think this device and a Steam Machine (just a PC with a badge on it) will be in the same realm of competition. This would most likely compete with the Ouya, where the Steam Machine would compete with the 5th gen consoles.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> Does Amazon see the future?

Content delivery platform for commercials/suggestions + shipping infrastructure to deliver products + drone delivery for last mile = Commercials with immediate product purchase ability.

Amazon can even broadcast a commercial in a geographic area, know the percentage of users who will immediately want the commercial's product, and pre-emptively unleash drones to a geographic location to drop off the product within seconds.

</comment><comment><USER43> Android Developers who want to jump into this opportunity: [https://developer.amazon.com/sdk/asb.html](https://developer.amazon.com/sdk/asb.html) & [https://developer.amazon.com/public/community/blog/author/Mi...](https://developer.amazon.com/public/community/blog/author/Mike+Hines)

<comment><USER43> It would be interesting to know if the Fire TV is running on X86 or ARM processor. Anyone know?

<comment><USER44> Check out the post about the additional details and comments for specs: [http://bit.ly/1pLH83y](http://bit.ly/1pLH83y) Interesting to see what they are doing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> Impressive, they beat Apple TV and Google to the app/game punch. This could be big. Disappointed in Apple doing nothing with TV apps/games, all the while having years of lead time.

</comment><comment><USER46> I like the voice search idea, but I'm still hooked on the Chromecast / HDMI on a stick form factor. I just don't see the point in cables anymore.

The UI looks neat and I'm really impressed with Amazon's search results on my Roku, so this will probably improve on that.

If it wasn't so 'big' and 'expensive', I'd buy one.

</comment><comment><USER47> More information about the SDK has also been released here:

[https://developer.amazon.com/public/community/post/Tx1K5ORNN...](https://developer.amazon.com/public/community/post/Tx1K5ORNNPOMUXA/Put- your-Apps-and-Games-on-more-screens-with-Amazon-Fire-TV)

</comment><comment><USER48> I keep thinking to myself "The second Apple puts out an SDK for the Apple TV, it's over"

If you're going to spend $99, you're probably going to wait for Apple or Google. If you want to spend less, you'll just get a Chromecast.

<comment><USER49> I keep thinking "There will be an Apple TV SDK any second now."

I'm surprised it's taken them this long to release it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> Does this support playing local media? It seems like no, but I couldn't find any explicit answer.

<comment><USER9> I saw an icon for Plex, so maybe?

<comment><USER51> More than likely plex streaming, like roku has.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> I have difficulty envisioning exactly how this market is going to develop. None of the products (AppleTV, Roku, Google, Amazon) are differentiated enough to imagine someone who's pretty happy with their box switching, particularly given various ways you'd get locked into particular features or media (e.g., if the average AppleTV user has bought a bunch of movies from iTunes, they're unlikely to switch to Amazon even if they like the games).

At the price point, you can imagine people owning more than one device to get access to different feature silos, but the huge duplication of features (e.g. every device having Netflix) makes this feel wasteful. Furthermore, I think people quickly run into a limitation on how many HDMI ports their TV has. If you're going to have a cable box and DVD/BluRay player connected, you need to have 3 ports to be able to connect one of these devices at all, and you can't plausibly have more than two. (I don't know how many HDMI ports TVs have in the market, but 2, 3, and 4 seems to cover the consumer space in a very small sampling of Amazon availability.)

If I were building one of these devices, I would include an HDMI switch with pass-through so I don't consume an HDMI port. In the absence of that, it's not clear at all to me what the shape of market adoption looks like.

<comment><USER53> For less than a $100 bucks I make pick this up to put alongside my Apple TV just so I can watch Amazon video without airplay.

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> This looks really cool but I'll have to wait and see how it compares to the other devices that accomplish the same objectives. I would have liked to see it include gigabit ethernet instead of just 10/100\. Interesting that they have a game controller available.

I've been looking for something to replace my Popcorn Hour, but I haven't been able to find anything in this price range that will play MKV files and allow playing movies over USB. Maybe this will be the answer?

<comment><USER55> Western Digital's WDTV Live can play any file you throw at it. [http://www.wdc.com/en/products/products.aspx?id=330](http://www.wdc.com/en/products/products.aspx?id=330)

It supports many online services as well, but unfortunately no Prime Instant Video. I have yet to see a box that offers everything I want: Local and network media playback, Netflix, Prime.

However, I wish the WDTV had better specs and UI - it can be a little clunky.

<comment><USER56> Roku is close once you use Plex. You get local network playback + Netflix, Prime, Crackle, Hulu, Pandora which is what I want. The video quality, performance, bugs, and gaming support of the Roku suck though. I keep swapping my Roku for a Chromecast and back again.

I'd like a box that supports Prime, local network playback, and casual gaming/emulation. If Amazon would have released a Prime Video app I'd switch to some of those cheap Android PCs on an HDMI stick by now but they've been holding out probably to use as a carrot to get people locked into their app store.

I hate having to side-load apps but if I can on the FireTV and get local network playback working I very well might buy one.

Edit: Looks like it will have Plex and Miracast support.

<comment><USER57> I used to use Plex for network playback with my earlier roku's but with my Roku 3 I can play videos, mp3s, photos etc. natively directly from my NAS.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER58> I love it, but I don't see that there is an app for non-kindle devices for managing or playing video for the Fire TV. The thing I like about chromecast is the ability to browse and play video from my ipad. But of course chromecast doesn't have amazon prime, so I have to switch to my roku to watch Walking Dead.

If Fire TV has an app to manage it for ipad or android, then it's pretty much the perfect device.

<comment><USER59> Maybe not exactly what you're looking for, but this is referenced elsewhere in the thread -

[https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/amazon-instant- video/id54551...](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/amazon-instant- video/id545519333?mt=8)

</comment></comment><comment><USER60> The competitive advantage seems to be in the Voice Search and in the gaming. If the gaming takes off, it'll be hard for anyone to compete. Everyone so far is talking about the Roku and Apple TV as competition, which they are, but what about the Xbox and PS4? Those offer gaming and other streaming services like Netflix too. And it seems as though Amazon is trying to be at the center of all of them.

<comment><USER61> The problem is that gaming is hard. Look at the ouya disaster. If you want to build a successful gaming product, you need a big developer relations team and a bunch of good first party titles to kick things off. If amazon was really trying to build a gaming console here, they needed to announce with some compelling games. as it is, nobody is going to spend the extra 40 for the controller without any games and nobody is going to write games for a platform with no users.

<comment><USER62> ouya only supported selected games. If this box supports all games along with emulators and top tier games, it may be a different outcome.

<comment><USER61> Ouya only supported selected games because games designed for a touchscreen interface are hard to play on a TV and with a gamepad. Amazon can support all games if they want to, but they're going to run into the same problem where most of them suck.

<comment><USER62> I said in another comment , but you're thinking candy crush I'm thinking emulators and titles like GTA, Modern Combat, Minecraft, and many other rpg and fps titles.

Most of the games on the play store have controller support. With a ps or xbox controller and apps for mapping if necessary.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER63> This device plus antenna input for over-the-air local HD channels combined with simple dvr functionality would be the ultimate cord-cutting device.

<comment><USER64> Exactly. Especially one without a monthly fee for service. It seems with the storage costs and the processing power here, Amazon could integrate that easily.

Edit: the really interesting part is that when searching for "DVR" in electronics, the first result is this device.

[http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search- alias%3Del...](http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search- alias%3Delectronics&field-keywords=dvr)

</comment></comment><comment><USER65> Prominently showing Game of Thrones content in the images, even though the Fire doesn't support HBO Go? Way to be deceptive, Amazon.

<comment><USER9> Amazon Instant Video has GoT [http://www.amazon.com/Winter-Is- Coming/dp/B007BVOEPI/ref=sr_...](http://www.amazon.com/Winter-Is- Coming/dp/B007BVOEPI/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1396455947&sr=8-3&keywords=game+of+thrones)

</comment></comment><comment><USER66> I think this represents the first device to support Amazon streaming in 1080p - as far as I know Roku etc are still limited to 720p?

<comment><USER67> It's not actually clear whether Amazon Instant Video will stream at 1080p for any/all HD material, or if the device just supports 1080p for other services like Netflix. Does anyone know?

<comment><USER24> I have Amazon Instant Video on a Sony Bluray and it is 1080p.

Out of interest, it's not really instant. The application could be swifter to respond.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER68> I love chromecast (have two imported) and for my use the lack of features such as remote/ui are a huge bonus over the slow dysfunctional bloatware crap in "smart" televisions. I want my screen to be just another display device I can send stuff too rather than the focus. That would probably change if I wanted my tv dongle to double as a games console but at current price/performance I don't see acceptable big screen gaming happening in a sub $100 device for awhile yet.

I think people are going to go with price rather than features for tv and Chromecast/Roku and a mountain of clones will take most of the sales. People who want to play games aren't going to do it on a $100 box from Amazon. They will stick to Xbox One/PS4 or a Steam box.

I imagine Amazon are thinking they can rely on content to sell these but I don't know that they are that strong an offering. However this turns out the real winners are going to be Netflix.

</comment><comment><USER69> Why is this priced on par with Apple TV? That's like pricing a Kindle on par with an iPad. I always thought that unlike Apple, Amazon's strategy was to sell really cheap hardware so that you can consume more content.

</comment><comment><USER70> And I just bought the new Roku Streaming stick...I'll be curious to see how they stack up. Amazon offers a comparison of FireTV to the Roku3, but not the Roku Streaming Stick. And the Stick is just $49.

</comment><comment><USER9> Congrats to the FireTV team!

</comment><comment><USER71> Glad to finally see Amazon announce this. Also I can finally share with family and friends about what I worked on during my internship at Broadcom. It took longer than expected for Amazon to finally release it which makes me think they went through multiple chip design iterations after I finished my internship at Broadcom last year. So long in fact that I thought it would never see the light of day. Excited to see how customers respond, this is definitely going to shake things up. Glad I had a small role in bringing this to life.

<comment><USER72> The main chips are listed as

       SOC Platform   Qualcomm Snapdragon 8064
       Processor      Qualcomm Krait 300, quad-core to 1.7 Ghz
       GPU            Qualcomm Adreno 320

what Broadcom tech does it use?

</comment></comment><comment><USER73> I'll be curious how good the screen mirroring is. Does anyone know if it's using a direct connection (like miracast) or an indirect over your normal wifi rounter (like apple tv mirroring)?

<comment><USER9> Miracast according to Press Release:

You can also wirelessly mirror your tablet display to your Fire TV with Kindle Fire, as well as other Miracast-enabled phones or tablets starting later this year. Fire TV supports standards like DIAL, so app developers can enable multi-screen experiences based on open technologies.

[http://phx.corporate-ir.net/phoenix.zhtml?c=176060&p=irol- ne...](http://phx.corporate-ir.net/phoenix.zhtml?c=176060&p=irol- newsArticle&ID=1915168&highlight=)

</comment></comment><comment><USER74> Not enough differentiation, give us some other channels, live news, or broadcast TV and we'll buy it in a heartbeat. Otherwise your features are surprisingly irrelevant.

This is mostly bad news for Roku, before this, the paradigm was, Apple TV for iTunes, Roku for Amazon. During the holidays there were so many roku photos on amazon, I thought they owned them. I think Amazon will slowly strangle Roku. Amazon probably tried to buy Roku, they declined, so they said, "fine we'll make our on device and crush you" Typical Amazon.

<comment><USER20> > other channels, live news, or broadcast TV and we'll buy it in a heartbeat.

Agreed! Does anyone know of any device that offers live streaming news from CNN, Fox, etc.? The Roku store doesn't list CNN; it does list Fox News but only "video clips" and not a full 24/7 live stream of the television channel: [http://www.roku.com/channels/#search/cnn/by- popular](http://www.roku.com/channels/#search/cnn/by-popular)

</comment></comment><comment><USER75> $35 and chromecast work for me.. don't see a need for this. Not only that I can just start playing any video and browse to 127.0.0.1:8888 and stream whatever I want via chromecast.

</comment><comment><USER76> _Alpha House_

And there it is, as a dropdown appears with only one entry you still have to select, and then continue to travel three menus deep to get to a point where video appears.

What are they thinking?

</comment><comment><USER77> Interestingly enough, the 'What is Fire TV' video heavily features HBO content (Game of Thrones, Veep, etc), but doesn't support HBO Go?

</comment><comment><USER78> To me it looks like the biggest comparison is Apple TV (and Roku which I'm less familiar with). It's just an incremental version of the Apple TV for the Amazon ecosystem and to me that's the biggest disappointment. I would have much preferred that they go in the direction of incremental improvement over the Chromecast which would make this industry much more exciting in my opinion.

</comment><comment><USER79> So is everyone making these now? The only thing Amazon seems to have brought to this is voice command, assuming it has actually been brought.

</comment><comment><USER80> So I just bought a new TV that has Amazon Prime, Netflix, Voice search integrated into it. I don't play games. Is there any point in me getting this vs getting an Apple TV or a Chromecast? The only thing I would use an Apple TV (all computers in my house are macs) for is to screenshare wirelessly. I believe Chromecast lets me do that for specific apps.

<comment><USER81> Chromecast lets you "cast" a tab from chrome, but the performance will be subpar. Very subpar. Don't try to watch a video with that or anything. If your macs are all modern enough (sandy bridge or newer) AirPlay display mirroring/extending works pretty well. The latency is noticeable but not the end of the world if you're using it to consume content. You won't want to full screen a 1080p video in VLC though, the framerate will be good but not perfect. There's an app Beamer that can be used for things like that. For most video files it won't need to transcode the whole thing, rather it'll just demux and maybe transcode the audio to AAC (appletv can natively play common video formats).

<comment><USER80> So if I ever want to full screen a 1080p video which is pretty all I would ever do on a Mac and a TV, I should just hook it up using HDMI?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER82> I have a WD Live TV box that I've enjoyed so far. It has all these streaming services except Amazon Prime, and it will play all my AVI/MP4/MKV files, streaming over DLNA.

This has some sweet features though, the voice search sounds good and the horsepower should allow for an overall nicer experience (speed of booting, menus, graphical effects in apps, etc).

</comment><comment><USER83> The one thing about the Roku I like a lot is the headset on the remote. I love that! I can be in a room with my headset and not disturb my wife sleeping and enjoy the show.

The lack on the headset jack on the remote on this for me would be a non- starter. Other than that, nothing to write home about. I can't see anything here that would make me switch from the Roku.

</comment><comment><USER84> This seems like a really good offering by Amazon. Now we'll just have to see if the competition lowers its prices or no.

<comment><USER61> Why would they drop prices? At 99 this is just following the status quo.

</comment></comment><comment><USER85> Anyone know if this will work for nonUSAsians

</comment><comment><USER64> What is everyone using for a DVR? Why doesn't this include some time of recording, storage and pausing capabilities? The DVR provided by the cable companies are laggy and the Tivo one charges a monthly fee for what equates to updating program guides, but not accounting for shows actually running over.

</comment><comment><USER86> Is it missing YouTube? Also, if it easy to buy newly released movies like you can with iTunes on the Apple TV?

</comment><comment><USER4> How hackable will the android on this thing be? Will you be able to connect bluetooth-based gamepads to it?

</comment><comment><USER87> > enjoy best-selling titles from Mojang, EA, Disney...

Now that's an interesting order of emphasis.

</comment><comment><USER88> Do these convex/rounded remotes that this and the Roku have bother anyone else? They seem to slide off the couch easier and if I set it down on a flat surface, it rocks back and forth for several seconds.

</comment><comment><USER44> Looks like we can develop for this. If you're an Android developer you should check out all the specs and docs here: [http://bit.ly/1pLH83y](http://bit.ly/1pLH83y)

<comment><USER89> This is pretty cool. Makes sense to port over my apps. Seems pretty straight forward. We basically just need to change UI and game controller functions...

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I've thought for a while that a voice-interface was one of the features Steve Jobs saw as key to "cracking" TV.

Now Amazon has done it. I'm curious about what Apple may announce later this month.

</comment><comment><USER90> I had a Roku and returned it. Amzn Fire TV doesn't seem much better. I'm sticking with PS3 for now, the only thing that can stream Youtube, Netflix, Amazon Instance Video and what not.

</comment><comment><USER91> Fire TV lacks iTunes and Google Play. Apple TV lacks Google Play and Amazon Prime Instant Video. Chromecast lacks iTunes and Amazon Prime Instant Video.

And now we have a million and one ways to watch Netflix.

</comment><comment><USER92> curious if it'll support YouTube, didn't see on the list.

<comment><USER93> It's in the matrix farther down on the page as a checkbox, "sorted" below Crackle and Hulu Plus.

The YouTube logo is not in the big image describing "What's on Amazon FireTV?" [0], apparently it is one of the "plus many more".

[0] [https://images-na.ssl-images- amazon.com/images/G/01/kindle/d...](https://images-na.ssl-images- amazon.com/images/G/01/kindle/dp/2014/B/feature-whatson2.jpg)

</comment></comment><comment><USER94> No rechargeable remote? Should of had a simple dock on top to charge the remote and another dock purchased with the game pad. No need for batteries.

</comment><comment><USER95> I ordered one with 1-day shipping.

I'm heading to Sunnyvale for a week and I'm tempted to take it with me to see how it works over the hotel WiFi.

</comment><comment><USER96> I have a Sony BluRay player I bought for $70 which plays Blu Rays, Amazon video, Netflix, etc. Why would I want to pay $99 for this box.

<comment><USER97> Apps, games, better user experience. I have the same BluRay player and I would choose this over that. That said, I already have the BluRay player so there will need to be a game worth $140 for me to get this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER98> Any indication on whether or not it will run XBMC?

<comment><USER95> I'm curious myself if this will be capable of running XBMC or another app for streaming content over a LAN. FireTV runs an Android variant, so it seems like it's plausible, but it depends on if you need to root it or if it will be an installable app.

</comment></comment><comment><USER99> Does it have a headphone jack on the remote ala the Roku 3? It's probably one of the more useful features on the new Roku box.

</comment><comment><USER100> Cant wait to jailbreak this and run xbmc on it.

</comment><comment><USER101> I don't want another box and remote. I would rather have an Amazon Video app with Chromecast functionality for Android.

</comment><comment><USER102> How many remotes will this support? If I can hook up 2-4 controllers to it then it will be in my house soon.

<comment><USER103> It supports a total of seven controllers and remotes:

"Amazon Fire TV allows up to 7 remotes and game controllers to be connected at one time. Each game controller can be associated with a player ID, opening up multi-player gaming in the living room. Games can even use different combinations of input types (remotes and game controllers) to make multi- player gaming easy for everyone."

[https://developer.amazon.com/public/solutions/devices/fire-t...](https://developer.amazon.com/public/solutions/devices/fire- tv)

</comment></comment><comment><USER104> There is a trick to enter diagnostic/device mode and enter CLI debug. Email firstname.lastname@example.com

</comment><comment><USER105> The lady in the photo looks like she's confusing the remote for a candy bar.

</comment><comment><USER106> For gaming, this would be an ideal place to have an OnLive client.

</comment><comment><USER107> Any idea how many controllers the system will support?

</comment><comment><USER108> Not seeing HBO Go. That means no GoT on demand :-(

<comment><USER109> It's apparently coming, but not part of launch: [http://www.engadget.com/2014/04/02/hbo-go-sho-anytime- amazon...](http://www.engadget.com/2014/04/02/hbo-go-sho-anytime-amazon-fire- tv/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER110> Or simply stick with a Raspberry Pi, which is free of arbitrary manufacturer- imposted restrictions and comfortably off of the locked-down-software induced upgrade treadmill.

<comment><USER95> RPI is a single-core @700mhz with 512MB RAM compared to quad-core, 2GB of RAM, so it's a significant bump up in hardware specs for not that much money.

I'm curious how long it will take people to root it.

<comment><USER110> Sure, the hardware is faster, but for what purpose and at what cost? We're well into the a time where the capabilities of a device have much more to do with its software than its raw hardware specs.

When you root a proprietary environment, the best you can do is gain a leg-up within the ecosystem of the initial manufacturer. You're always swimming against an overall current of what the manufacturer implements, and paying a usability tax every time you use the device and things that should be easy are either a little harder, or have to be coped with on other devices.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER111> Anyone know if this supports DLNA?

<comment><USER112> They list "Plex" (DLNA server) in their "streaming services" list. It would be nice to know if there are other servers supported.

</comment></comment><comment><USER113> Or you could just buy a Roku?

</comment><comment><USER114> well if this works as advertised it seems the end of cable could very near.

</comment><comment><USER115> Pretty cool: [http://firetv.com](http://firetv.com)

<comment><USER116> Warning: the link above is highly NSFW.

<comment><USER115> Sorry, should have mentioned that bit. AMZN has just bid the value of that domain through the roof though.

<comment><USER117> Maybe a few years ago when the search engines used exact match domains as a key relevancy indicator. SE now are highly likely to put amazon.tld above firetv.com for all "fire tv" searches [Google does for me now anyway]. Who types in domain names anyway?

Amazon's brand strength means those not going to a SE are going to go to Amazon.tld to find it, certainly that was what I did without thinking about it. [Sadly though there's nothing there that's relevant except the option to buy a Chromecast, seems very poor marketing to me. They could probably take pre-orders even without a localised list of content providers being ready].

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER118> oh my, it looks like it supports mkv containers.

</comment><comment><USER119> Ouch no HBO Go.

</comment><comment><USER120> this is a me too product

<comment><USER104> That it is.

</comment></comment><comment><USER121> Tech specs here: [https://developer.amazon.com/sdk/asb/device- specs.html](https://developer.amazon.com/sdk/asb/device-specs.html)

</comment><comment><USER122> Just another Roku, Google TV, Apple TV

</comment><comment><USER123> Do they try not to mention Youtube? Only in the comparison chart!

</comment><comment><USER124> This is not good enough. What's the improvement that is worth $100?</comment>


MSDN Magazine will publish its last issue in November - <AUTHOR> https://msdn.microsoft.com/magazine/mt833502 <comment><USER3> I see a lot of magazines shut down and I have to wonder what the costs to run these are, even at say a low number of prints.

There are times I wish I could sit down and do some reading in magazine form, etc. But none of the topics I want to read exist as far as web development goes. It makes sense due to the immediacy of all the content i get... but I do sort of yearn for a curated physical form too...

Instead I find myself flipping through my son's lego magazines.

I hope they come back in a cheap to publish / novelty type thing.

<comment><USER4> > even at say a low number of prints.

at some point the smaller the print run the less economical it becomes to print. The litho plates and other press setup costs will become a higher and higher proportion of the cost of each copy.

<comment><AUTHOR> Not sure printing and distribution is such a big part in the overall costs.

OTOH, this is a marketing operation, not really an editorial one - <USER2> doesn't expect to make money out of it.</comment></comment></comment>


A Tinder-style app called Tudder lets farmers find breeding matches for cattle - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-02-10/cows-get-tinder-app-as-u-k-breeders-seek-moo-love-for-herds <comment><USER2> _...a process that often involves transporting animals long distances for breeding._

Cattle breeding, you're doing it wrong. Maybe it's different in UK, but on every ranch I've ever seen, if the cows aren't just out with a bull or two for a portion of the year, which bulls live the rest of the year in a nearby pasture, they get artificially inseminated. The majority (I'm at 70% this season) of those AI'ed cows get pregnant. The rest receive the attentions of a pickup bull (sometimes after another AI attempt), which bull lives in the same locale as the rest of the cattle. Very few commercially successful ranchers are hauling cows a long distance to be bred.

It is good to get semen for AI from high quality bulls available from firms like Genex, but UPS ships semen every day.

Maybe they were thinking of thoroughbred horses? That breed of that different species has a live cover requirement for progeny registration, mostly to preserve some variety. Like cattle breeders, thoroughbred breeders need a lot more information than a picture...

<comment><USER3> >>...a process that often involves transporting animals long distances for breeding.

> Cattle breeding, you're doing it wrong.

Try selling cattle.

I was previously a co-founder at (the now defunct) CloudHerd, an online cattle marketplace in Australia. We wanted to remove the requirement to physically transport cattle from seller-farm, to stockyard (physical auction house), to buyer (or back to seller if unsold). Massive waste of time and money, as well as increased stress on the animals and pollution from additional transport step.

<comment><USER2> That would be more plausible. Public stockyards are unhealthy places, and the "arm's-length" nature of those transactions means the buyer should always assume that purchased cattle are not as valuable as they seem. (For instance, there is no testing for persistent BVD at auctions around here, nor is there a requirement to declare such an infection if the seller knows about it. The state vets will catch up with this in about a decade, at which point some other disease they don't care about will be relevant.) Basically we view public auctions as a "sink": cattle can leave the farm that way but they can't enter from there. Many cattle that leave that way go to the food industry, so there is a natural limit on the sale price. Even the buyers for that segment would prefer to buy steers for which they know the breeding and health histories, which is not really possible at a public auction.

At farm auctions, one or more large farms will sell their surplus stock that has never left that farm and has received all the same care as the cattle they're keeping. These make a lot more sense for cattle to introduce into one's permanent herd, but the result is a sort of "rich get richer" effect since only large farms with long histories can do this. We've gotten our last several bulls this way, at a farm where the owner's _grandfather_ started the auction in the _1920s_. It's also possible to purchase cattle in a private sale directly, but this is so inconvenient for the seller that it's less common.

I think there is a place for a tool that makes private sales less painful. However, there are a number of challenges. On average, cattle people are reluctant to use apps with the necessary complexity, and they are less likely to trust the app itself. Also, it would be difficult to capture all the relevant qualities of cattle remotely. How many private sellers have a scale? How many of them keep vaccination records? How many of them know anything about their cattle's EPDs? How many of them have even heard of persistent BVD (or whatever other disease is locally relevant; I'm told that in Kansas, pinkeye is still impossible to eradicate whereas we just vaccinate and forget it)? Who will haul the cattle from seller to buyer and how will the cost of that vary according to different buyers? Not all of these qualities will be important to any particular sale, but some of these would be the way to beat public auctions: get better prices for sellers and better cattle for buyers.

<comment><USER3> Yep you raise valid points. We reduced the impact of a few of those by creating an inventory/farm management system that basically encouraged users to enter relevant data like vaccination schedules, weights etc - which we then piped straight into the auction system. So essentially the better your record keeping, the more trustworthy your herd looked at auction. One of the (many) difficulties was getting the farmers off of pen and paper records / excel sheets and into our system.

<comment><USER2> There is a _lot_ of money waiting for whoever can help the beef and dairy industries become more efficient. My theory is that before we try the big "boil the ocean" stuff like a marketplace for private cattle sales, we need to find smaller easier wins. Dominance of a small market could open up possibilities for bigger markets.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> My dad taught agriculture for like 30 years. My sister teaches it now.

I'm ashamed I didn't think of this :(

<comment><USER5> Especially for the sale of semen for artificial insemination. Most of it, from what I've seen, is done via glorified mail-order catalogues. Tinder isn't the right format, it's not a swipe sort of deal. It'd be more like OK Cupid where you could filter on a set of criteria, metrics, and answers to questions.

There's still time to start OK Corral Cupid! (=

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> When devising terms and conditions for an online classifieds project of mine, the lawyer provided language prohibiting "stud service", which I always got a kick out of. Is brokering "stud service" actually illegal anywhere?

</comment><comment><USER7> Not seeing how that differs from the existing herdbooks that are kept for most breeds which are used to manage AIS programmes; they're how for example the Jersey and Guernsey remain distinct despite global distribution.

They've been digital for decades now...

<comment><USER8> When I worked at Issuu I learned we had tons of documents dedicated to bull semen. For those interested in an industry few outside of ranching probably know about you can take a look here: [https://issuu.com/search?language=all&q=Bull%20semen&sortby=...](https://issuu.com/search?language=all&q=Bull%20semen&sortby=date&type=publication)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Article reads like an April fools'. Cute idea, but 'cow love' is business, each bull has as many statistics as a baseball player.

Did you know that most dairy listings wouldn't even show pictures of the bull? They're far more interested in the the Bull's daughters. (which you can see in both the fancy print catalog, and often the online listings as well)/

Hectare, maker of the app according to the article does have some catalog listings online, (like this one) [https://www.sellmylivestock.co.uk/view/product/E0DE3752-5E89...](https://www.sellmylivestock.co.uk/view/product/E0DE3752-5E89-462C-9753-3FE8A20438CC?linked=&linkedPrice=)

and some other useful sounding sites/services like sellmylivestock and graindex [https://www.hectare.farm/](https://www.hectare.farm/) so perhaps it's the breezy article that makes the app seem so frivolous.

</comment><comment><USER10> The Yorkshireman in me wants to pronounce this as _T 'udder_.

Does anyone know if the founders were from Yorkshire?

To be fair I also thought the same about the VW 'E Up' [http://www.britishslang.co.uk/slang/ey- up](http://www.britishslang.co.uk/slang/ey-up)

<comment><USER11> Came to say the same thing

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> i held out a small hope, before clicking the article, that for some stupid reason it would actually be the cows using the app and not the farmers. of course i was always going to be disappointed.

<comment><USER13> It's hard to swipe with hooves.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> If this were written by a German developer, it would probably be called... "Rinder"

<comment><USER15> Or Rindr, for bulls.

<comment><USER6> Wouldn't that be from an Austrian developer?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I initially read "cops" instead of "cows" and enjoyed the headline's phrasing maybe a bit too much.

</comment><comment><USER17> I'm bullish on this idea.

<comment><USER18> You could say the idea is udderly obvious in retrospect.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> If anyone knows this for dogs pls lmk.

Tried singing up my golden retriever for tinder to find mates and they banned my account.

<comment><USER20> yes this is tinder working as intended. i wish they would ban users like you quicker</comment></comment>


Nintendo predicts first annual loss, lowers earnings forecast - <AUTHOR> http://games.yahoo.com/blogs/plugged-in/nintendo-posts-first-annual-loss-lowers-earnings-forecast-183708904.html

<comment><USER2> I'm considering selling my Nintendo stock at a loss. I don't see how they can come back considering the rise of mobile gaming on phones and tablets... something's got to give somewhere and I think it's Nintendo.</comment>


A Short Guide To Open-Source And Similar Licenses - <AUTHOR> http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2010/03/24/a-short-guide-to-open-source-and-similar-licenses/

<comment><USER2> IANAL, but afaik this is wrong: "The only catch is that the other project must also be released under the GPL."

You can use GPL-code freely in your own projects, _but_ if you distribute, then it must be under GPL compatible terms. This is especially important in web applications and maybe other SaaS type solutions, where you don't actually distribute the software, but allow users to use it from your servers.

</comment><comment><USER3> The Creative Commons "noncommercial" restriction being vague is quite important. A lot of content is being published under the CC licenses, and it would be good to get some clarification. For example, would an ad-supported re-publishing of the content be against the license?

Anyone know of authoritative definitions of this clause?

</comment><comment><USER4> For reference here is a full list of OSI approved licenses: <http://www.opensource.org/licenses/alphabetical></comment>


Why you can't change the shipping address for your new iPhone 5 - <AUTHOR> http://gist.io/3723392

<comment><USER2> Once you order you can change the delivery address here: <http://www.apple.com/orderstatus>

I also called Apple today and had one of my order's delivery address changed.

</comment><comment><USER3> Yeah, I'm doubting that. My shipping address was old, and didn't match my billing address. A) it accepted it, B) I could change it.</comment>


The MIT License, Line by Line - <AUTHOR> https://writing.kemitchell.com/2016/09/21/MIT-License-Line-by-Line.html <comment><USER2> Would like to see a similar ISC breakdown with as detailed a compare/contrast of the effective differences.</comment>


OpenSeadragon: A pure JavaScript high-resolution zoomable image viewer - <AUTHOR> https://openseadragon.github.io/ <comment><USER2> A pretty nifty (if I do say so myself) project I implemented with OpenSeadragon.

[http://beehivecollective.org/posterViewer/?poster=mr](http://beehivecollective.org/posterViewer/?poster=mr)

I am NOT responsible for the art or narrative, just for putting it online with an OpenSeadragon-based implementation.

Source: [https://github.com/jrochkind/beehive_poster_viewer](https://github.com/jrochkind/beehive_poster_viewer)

The Mesoamerica Resiste poster is an incredibly large high-res image, and OpenSeadragon works well for allowing very high-res zoom-in, with quick initial load. I had to fight with OSD a bit to get the UI I wanted, but once I spelunked through the source a bit I could usually figure out how to hook in to do what I needed. (And Javascript is not my most fluent language, which perhaps shows in my source). I'm pretty happy with OSD. Still a couple things that aren't quite right in my implementation, it gets confusing to figure out what's going on with high-res images and maintaining proper resolution (also not in my wheelhouse), and the version of OSD I was using didn't neccesarily always do the right thing with high-res "retina" displays (there were some improvements to this in master, not sure if they've been released yet). But overall, OSD is pretty amazingly high quality software, for free.

[http://beehivecollective.org/posterViewer/?poster=mr#s=An%20...](http://beehivecollective.org/posterViewer/?poster=mr#s=An%20Alternative%20Economy%3A%20Exchange)

<comment><USER3> Nice. However, the animation/easing when selecting next/previous causes some eye strain. Maybe it's just me.

<comment><USER2> Thanks for the feedback.

Yeah, I think it could be better. I had a lot of trouble getting it right, and it required hacking with OpenSeadragon a bit to adjust from the default easing, which was meant for applying to user-drag actions not automated pan- and-zoom, and was definitely inappropriate by default.

Do you have any suggestions as to what characterstics of the animation/easing are causing eye strain or what sorts of changes would result in better?

<comment><USER4> I think that its too slow. Also, to prevent the eye focusing on things as they rush past, I would zoom out to view (most of) the poster and then zoom back in to the new detail.

<comment><USER2> Cool, thanks for the advice.

It's tricky to figure out good algorithms for moving from any arbitrary view to any other, with easing and timing etc. Sometimes the pan/zoom is just moving a little bit, in those cases zooming all the way out and back in again would be wrong. So you've got to take all of that into account with some good heuristics in an algorithm.

Tricky, but also kind of fun, I'll take another go at it sometime.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> One thing I did with a friend back when XKCD 1110 came out: [http://dump.ventero.de/xkcd1110/open.html](http://dump.ventero.de/xkcd1110/open.html)

IMHO Seadragon _feels_ much nicer and fluid compared to the host of Leaflet- based viewers that appeared on that day. But maybe I'm biased because I was involved in this viewer ;)

</comment><comment><USER6> We use OpenSeadragon for our collection pages at: [http://collection.imamuseum.org/](http://collection.imamuseum.org/)

We use have a Python tile_generator: [https://github.com/IMAmuseum/tile_generator](https://github.com/IMAmuseum/tile_generator)

Also, I just developed a PHP composer package: [https://github.com/jeremytubbs/deepzoom](https://github.com/jeremytubbs/deepzoom)

<comment><USER7> Wow, beautiful integration! Great content, too :-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Really nice. The only thing I would change is to remove the "smooth" drag. It just makes it feel like it is lagging behind. Just stick it to my mouse.

<comment><USER3> The smooth drag reduces eye strain caused by animating/easing a detailed image with low FPS.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Can anyone provide any insight on how OpenSeadragon is blazingly fast? Compare this to websites that have to rerender pixelated zoomed-in views after each zoom command.

<comment><USER5> At its core it's just a quadtree of tiles, just like any other such application. This means that the data to transmit or keep in memory is just proportional to what fits on the screen.

Furthermore, Seadragon employs animations to bridge perceptible performance gaps, e.g. loading new tiles. You get the blurry mess when zooming in as well, it gets slowly replaced by the sharper versions as new tiles get loaded. The use of the fading animation here helps mask the actual change, which makes it less visually jarring.

Another thing is that zooming uses a bit of inertia for the animation, with an easing effect. This takes much longer than Google Maps' or Leaflet's immediate zoom but (a) again, reduces the effect that the new frame upon interaction is totally different from the previous, and (b) during the animation new tiles are loaded already and replaced. This often means that by the time the zoom animation ends you already have the sharper tiles on your screen _and_ the blurry ones were used predominantly during the animation during which you didn't notice the blurryness.

Panning also uses a spring to have some sort of easing for drags which means things are animated longer, thus more time for tiles to load without you noticing. Some people dislike that behaviour, I actually like it. It feels less "stiff" than what other tile-based viewers usually do.

In general, it's _not_ blazingly fast, or at least not faster than other technologies. It just makes good use of animations and a few perceptual tricks to make it _feel_ fast. Which is actually, what user-facing applications should concentrate much more, in my opinion. Raw performance matters much less than what users perceive (for interactive things anyway).

<comment><USER7> Well put!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This looks nice, but my question is, why not LeafletJS or OL3? What are the unique features?

<comment><USER2> I actually wasn't previously familiar with Leaflet, but when I look at it's demo's now, I generally find it's UI not quite as good as OpenSeadragon's. Another commenter below agrees with me.

It also looks like Leaflet may be focused on geographic data? OSD is not, it has no special geo features (which would be a problem if you need them), but is focused on _images_, which may end up giving it the sort of features (back- end and UI) and API suitable for people concered with high-res images as images, rather than maps. (Does Leaflet actually have facility for dealing with multi-resolution-level tiling? I would assume so, but it's not clear from a quick skim of the docs...)

Or it could just be that there are multiple products with overlapping feature sets. I don't think OpenSeadragon is neccesarily _newer_ than Leaflet, as I think you imply.

Looks like the first commit in Leaflet repo is Aug 2010; the first commit in OpenSeadragon is Nov 2011. I imagine both took a while to reach maturity. It's also worth pointing out that OpenSeadragon is the open source continutation of an originally proprietary Microsoft product. I'd say they were both developed relatively simulataneously, neither one was developed after a mature competitor already existed.

It does seem from this thread that OpenSeadragon was news to many people who already knew about Leaflet, so I guess Leaflet is better known? A year ago when I was looking for an open JS tiling image viewer, I found OpenSeadragon, and somehow didn't even come accross leaflet!

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I think this is amazing, I wish more services would adopt this. I hate when I'm on Amazon or Newegg and I'm zoomed in just enough to where I can read things, but as I drag my way around an image it has to re-render it numerous times (even if I "go back" to a spot). I guess Amazon and Newegg are attributing for bandwidth wasted loading an entire image that may not be looked at? Not sure. Still love this.

</comment><comment><USER12> A similar project created by the National Library of Poland: [https://github.com/Polona/malakh](https://github.com/Polona/malakh)

Example: [http://polona.pl/item/8214762/2/](http://polona.pl/item/8214762/2/)

<comment><USER7> Nice! Looking at the code, it seems that it's a very old version of OpenSeadragon, back when it was just called Seadragon. It's still looking good, so perhaps they've been adding their own extensions to it.

Thanks for pointing to it!

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Love the mouse-wheel scrolling! Very nice :-)

Unfortunately, I was thinking it was going to be a crowd-sourced version of a sea-launched space vehicle... [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea_Dragon_(rocket)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea_Dragon_\(rocket\))

Ah well, this is pretty awesome too.

</comment><comment><USER14> Openslide has a nice demo using OpenSeadragon. The histological slides can easily be > 100,000 pixels in width and height [http://openslide.org/demo/](http://openslide.org/demo/)

</comment><comment><USER15> On my Macbook the swipe to zoom in/out works beautifully well.

</comment><comment><USER16> Very interesting, and quite impressive. I've used iipsrv in the past [https://github.com/ruven/iipsrv](https://github.com/ruven/iipsrv) [http://iipimage.sourceforge.net/](http://iipimage.sourceforge.net/)

<comment><USER7> FYI, I believe it is possible to use OpenSeadragon on the front-end and IIPImage on the backend, since they both support IIIF.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> That is some impressive JS. Well written and organized.

</comment><comment><USER18> We have built a Java based tile generator with OpenSeaDragon Zoomable viewer integration.

You can have a look here.

[https://loftux.com/en/blog/announcing-the-zoomable-image- vie...](https://loftux.com/en/blog/announcing-the-zoomable-image-viewer-for- alfresco#sthash.XswkBIy3.dpbs)

Some examples below.

Envisat Radar Image of Netherlands, European Space Agency (8346 x 8525) \- [https://loftux.nu/share/s/zN6D_rbTT2GgAs4Ih4onHA](https://loftux.nu/share/s/zN6D_rbTT2GgAs4Ih4onHA)

Mountain View in High Resolution - Markus Spiske (2912 x 4368) \- [https://loftux.nu/share/s/c7V-c8zXRti_crqaTz_OJw](https://loftux.nu/share/s/c7V-c8zXRti_crqaTz_OJw)

KTM Motorcycle - Markus Spiske (2912 x 4368) \- [https://loftux.nu/share/s/UXgpPaEZSYOe22qTtukWJQ](https://loftux.nu/share/s/UXgpPaEZSYOe22qTtukWJQ)

Xmas Tools - Markus Spiske (4368 x 2912) \- [https://loftux.nu/share/s/YSO4OsW4Sbux8OASRLPf7A](https://loftux.nu/share/s/YSO4OsW4Sbux8OASRLPf7A)

Horse Eye - Markus Spiske (4368 x 2912) \- [https://loftux.nu/share/s/qCBsbvgkT3eIcsmSepHwYA](https://loftux.nu/share/s/qCBsbvgkT3eIcsmSepHwYA)

Hurricane Isabel - National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) (11600 x 8800) \- [https://loftux.nu/share/s/ntxyIcfhS1OoZimvlJn69Q](https://loftux.nu/share/s/ntxyIcfhS1OoZimvlJn69Q)

360 Degree Panorama of the Southern Sky - European Southern Observatory (ESO)/H.H. Meyer (15204 x 4620) \- [https://loftux.nu/share/s/UE8ldF3rRN2TjthaTVhL_w](https://loftux.nu/share/s/UE8ldF3rRN2TjthaTVhL_w)

When resolution becomes Counter Productive - Lies Through a Lens (3337 x 5000) \- [https://loftux.nu/share/s/KAVzW5HcS_ixdsmmk1tvnw](https://loftux.nu/share/s/KAVzW5HcS_ixdsmmk1tvnw)

PIA16568 - First Drilling Target of Curiosity Rover - Jet Propulsion Laboratory/NASA (12858 x 6312) \- [https://loftux.nu/share/s/PzaaDz10T9-wRru7rcxSeA](https://loftux.nu/share/s/PzaaDz10T9-wRru7rcxSeA)

USS Vulcan (Engineering Drawing) (17600 × 13600) \- [https://loftux.nu/share/s/Kx9pmszJT6GyX7sdn-4hDw](https://loftux.nu/share/s/Kx9pmszJT6GyX7sdn-4hDw)</comment>


In 2009, Microsoft Still Underestimates the Web - <AUTHOR> http://lifehacker.com/5127866/in-2009-microsoft-still-underestimates-the-web

<comment><USER2> Of the many pieces of evidence that Microsoft doesn't get the web, the fact that they suffer under download spikes is one of the least persuasive. For example: they think that buying Yahoo, the slowly sinking grandaddy of the web, is somehow going to help them beat Google, even though Google has been wiping the floor with Yahoo for near-on a decade now.

<comment><USER3> Why does it have to be about beating Google?

Business acquire companies to make money, to get ROI. That comes well before beating a competitor in any investment, unless its clear that they will damage your market share in the future.

Consumers will still need desktop OS's for a long time and Google isn't competing with Microsoft on the enterprise front (yet).

Live search is only a small portion of Microsoft's revenue, but $44 billion is a significant amount of cash.

<comment><USER4> I'd say a Google OS would have the potential to be pretty damaging to Microsoft's market share.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> > Microsoft's not the only one who's blown web launches. Apple did it > spectacularly with MobileMe

Oh, come on! Those aren't even in the same category. MobileMe wasn't a big file to download. If tanking on a large download means Microsoft is underestimating the web, then what the heck was Apple underestimating with MobileMe?

</comment><comment><USER6> Especially after Microsoft's Cashback.com outage on Black Friday (the _worst_ day for an e-shopping site to go down), I'm surprised they let this happen. This was on the calendar for a long time, and they should've gone to great lengths to make sure they could handle the traffic.

</comment><comment><USER7> Some tech at Microsoft chose the wrong server to host a download, therefore Microsoft's corporate strategy with respect to the Web is "clueless"?

Hard to argue with that kind of logic.

<comment><USER8> I don't think it is a good indicator of corporate strategy, but is deeper than just a bad web server.

I tried to get it so I could have a Windows machine for IE testing.

1) It required me to log in with my Microsoft Id. I didn't have one. No link or hint for how to create an account.

2) I clicked about a bit and found where to create an account. The SSL certificate was flagged as signed by an unrecognized authority. It was still a microsoft machine and I had come in from a trusted path, so I accepted it anyway.

3) This new account sent me an email to validate, but allowed me to log in and proceed BEFORE the validation was sent. Probably an abuse vector there.

4) I then get a page with a little green "loading" indicator spinning about. After staring at that for an hour I checked the javascript log and the javascript had blown up on load and left the animated gif misleading me that progress was happening. Don't be updating the loading user feedback device if you aren't loading. That is called lying.

5) Tried a couple more browsers, no better results. Eventually it degraded to 404s and then a "Coming Soon" page.

There are numerous warts on a rollout that is, at least partially, intended to change the media dialog from the negative tone of Vista to a "now things are good" message of Windows 7.

<comment><USER9> Yesterday I too tried to download the new version of windows life; but after 33%, it would not download any further

:(

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The hoster for the Windows 7 beta download is Akamai, MS is not hosting it themselves.

<comment><USER11> Maybe they should learn how to host files themselves? Just an idea...

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Akamai?

</comment><comment><USER13> Alternative take: Windows 7 _beta_ is such a popular download that with the current demand even MS is having troubles hosting it.

I think the rumours about Microsoft's near imminent death is greatly exaggerated.

<comment> old-gregg That was my take also.

Personally I could never understand why does everybody think Microsoft _must_ become a great Internet company. I do understand that a lot of people are tired of so many years of Microsoft dominance on the desktop and are willing to look stupid predicting their collapse just because another markets opened up that MS isn't dominating in (yet). But hey, IBM is still around and doing fine.

A friendly reminder to Web 2.0 types: the only company making seriously big piles of cash, the big boys club kind, is Google. And the rest of Internet ghetto can only dream of making the kind of cash Microsoft is generating without "getting it".

And speaking of new markets...

Here's another reminder: measured in computer years, widespread Internet is very, very, very old and can hardly be called a "disruptive technology" anymore. We've all had fun throwing VC-supported sheep for free, now lets get back to work, figuring out what software users want.

That's what Apple's been doing, and perhaps this is what Microsoft has done with Windows 7. I hope so, even though I'm not their customer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> when will these guys ever learn?</comment>


Keen to hear from other startups that have backdoor listed on the ASX! - <AUTHOR> http://www.startupdaily.com.au/2014/07/western-australias-new-trend-asx-now-competitor-angel-investors/

<comment><AUTHOR> I want to do a follow up piece on this one, that is a bit more in depth. Contact me at mbeeche at shoestring dot com dot au.</comment>


Show HN: Pdf-Bot, an API/CLI for Generating PDFs Using Headless Chrome - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/esbenp/pdf-bot <comment><USER6> Pretty cool! Check out Google's headless browser API Puppeteer too, they provide a few really useful functions for doing stuff like this.

[https://github.com/GoogleChrome/puppeteer/blob/master/exampl...](https://github.com/GoogleChrome/puppeteer/blob/master/examples/pdf.js)

Really easy to work around, I used it to build a simple CLI to generate device screenshots of a webpage by modifying the user-agent and resolution to match each device.

[https://github.com/umpox/generateDeviceScreenshots](https://github.com/umpox/generateDeviceScreenshots)

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah I think Puppeteer is a very cool project. Unfortunately, it came out literally one or two days after i finished the initial version of pdf-bot. Maybe I will incorporate it soon! :-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Really nice work.

I've had a great experience working with Headless Chrome to convert webpages to PDF for my side project EmailThis ([https://www.emailthis.me](https://www.emailthis.me)).

It uses Puppeteer by Chrome DevTools team - [https://github.com/GoogleChrome/puppeteer](https://github.com/GoogleChrome/puppeteer).

<comment><USER8> Cool project! I think I am going to start regularly making use of it. Does it email you a PDF attachment, or does it just send an email with the contents of the article within it? When I attempted to use it I did not see a pdf attachment. Regardless/either way, really cool project.

<comment><USER7> Thanks, if it is unable to extract useful content from a page, EmailThis will save it as PDF as send it as an attachmentment.

If you try saving a any discussion website (HN, Stackoverflow, Reddit), you will get the PDF.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> All I need now is CMYK support in Chrome and I can make HTML based print ready PDF rendering. That would be quite upgrade compared to my current options.

<comment><USER10> I work on Chrome's PDF generation.

Please file a bug report if you think this is an important feature.

<comment><USER11> I'll upvote both this and track bug report, if linked.

Yes, CMYK support is very tempting feature for the whole print industry.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> What's up with the built in queue? I feel like that belongs in a different script. For one, the built in nodeJS queue is useless in a multiple server environment. You'd still need a distributed queue since this built in one is only local to one server/thread. So the built in queue becomes redundant/pointless for any kind of solution that needs to scale

<comment><USER13> I was first wondering about all the complexity in the API as well (why a built-in queue, webhook, retry policy and storage interface when the actual transaction I'm interested in is just "url -> pdf blob"?)

However, I think this is necessary if you want to fit it into a microservice with a REST interface. For REST, I think the usual expectation is that a) the request returns quickly and b) you can submit any number of requests in parallel. Given that loading a page into headless chrome, rendering it and generating a pdf is both resource intensive and time consuming, I guess you need some way to decouple that process from the interface.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> How well does it work with multiple-page PDFs? One of our banes is generating mixed text/image downloadable reports with sensible page breaks. To save time, we're actually doing those as docx files, with the bonus/risk that clients can edit the content before saving it as a PDF.

<comment><USER15> Just use WkhtmlToPdf [https://wkhtmltopdf.org](https://wkhtmltopdf.org) and wrap a simple service around it.

<comment><USER16> That's one hell of a "just".

<comment><USER15> I did it in 2 days. Its not very hard.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Nice work !

Depending on your use case, I feel like you guys might be interested in [http://weasyprint.org/](http://weasyprint.org/). It is an open source HTML to PDF converter written in Python. It passes the Acid2 test and implements CSS Paged Media.

<comment><USER18> Always nice to discover another open source HTML rendering engine!

I recently discovered [https://github.com/ArthurHub/HTML- Renderer](https://github.com/ArthurHub/HTML-Renderer) formerly know as [https://htmlrenderer.codeplex.com/](https://htmlrenderer.codeplex.com/)

 _PDF generation [...] 100% managed (C#), High performance HTML Rendering library_

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> This is interesting :-)

I am currently using athenapdf[1] but I will have a play with pdf-bot.

[1] [https://github.com/arachnys/athenapdf](https://github.com/arachnys/athenapdf)

<comment><USER20> Core developer of `athenapdf` here :)

I had a quick look at `pdf-bot`, and though we both rely on the same underlying technology _(we are only just moving to headless Chromium; we were on Electron before)_ , I believe we have slightly different ambitions with our respective project. But, I may be biased.

For example, `pdf-bot` seems to be tied exclusively to a specific converter, and storage backend. With `athenapdf` however, we are moving more, and more towards building a toolkit or rather, framework for other people to construct their own conversion processes (or even microservice)[0].

Consequently, we are working towards general abstractions like fetching, converting, and uploading, that can have different implementations (e.g. wkhtmltopdf, LibreOffice, Weasyprint, etc).

With our microservice assembly as well, we are focused heavily on ensuring we have:

1\. Instrumentation, and metrics (which `pdf-bot` appears to currently lack)

2\. Support for different retry mechanisms (e.g. retry using the same converter or retry using a different converter)

3\. Support for multiple input MIME types

4\. Synchronous API calls (`pdf-bot` appears to be mostly asynchronous, with batch processing, and callbacks)

5\. Ease of installation (e.g. Docker), and configuration

We also have a CLI assembly[1] that can support _custom JavaScript plugins_ [2] (e.g. Markdown -> PDF, Readability, etc). So you don't need to run a service or make API calls for conversions.

[0] [https://github.com/arachnys/athenapdf/tree/v3/pkg](https://github.com/arachnys/athenapdf/tree/v3/pkg)

[1] [https://github.com/arachnys/athenapdf/blob/v3/cmd/cli/main.g...](https://github.com/arachnys/athenapdf/blob/v3/cmd/cli/main.go#L27)

[2] [https://github.com/arachnys/athenapdf/tree/v3/pkg/runner/plu...](https://github.com/arachnys/athenapdf/tree/v3/pkg/runner/plugin/js)

<comment><USER19> Thank you for athenapdf and for rescuing me from the pains of wkhtmltopdf - <USER2> am a happy user. :)

My only small problem with it was the somewhat complex setup for using athenapdf-service with a new project (especially since I use docker-machine) but I have now mostly automated the whole thing.

Just out of interest - do you consider asynchronous an advantage (being a Node developer I generally love async very much)? Not that it matters to me - <USER3> needs are trivial for the service to handle.

Edit: actually I can see how it async would make my life much more complicated for my simple use case - I would have to write something to track requests and responses rather than just looping through a bunch of URL's that need converting.

<comment><USER20> That's interesting feedback! Thank you :)

We actually went with Docker for the set up because it simplified dependency management tremendously, and it allowed us to deploy on platforms like Kubernetes, Swarm, and ECS. As a plus, it gave us some confidence that if it _works for us_ , it should _work for others_ (obviously, we have come across cases where Docker behaves differently across platforms).

I consider asynchronous processing (in this context) as advantageous in some cases. Indeed, when we were refactoring `athenapdf`, we considered introducing a message queue for workers to pull work from, and to put back when the work completes. The problem with this however, is that we can't as easily scale horizontally (i.e. introduce node replicas behind a load balancer), as if we tried to get / update a job, we may not get the same node we originally got. I mean, the solution can be as easy as introducing a centralised message queue of sorts (or even a sticky session), but that complicates the set up process, so we decided against it.

Taken together, for our specific use cases, we believe it is a lot simpler to consume a synchronous API. No webhooks / callbacks. No polling. No concerns over acknowledgement. If a HTTP call fails, we will know about it immediately. If a complex retry mechanism is needed, we think this should be accomplished in the client application.

In the long term, I believe we should have a toolkit that can easily be plugged into a wider orchestration engine like Conductor ([https://netflix.github.io/conductor/](https://netflix.github.io/conductor/)). That way, anyone can develop their own conversion process pipeline with ease.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Unfortunately, Chrome's kerning when it comes to printing is atrocious. Over the years, I've constantly tested it every once in a while with the hope that it would improve to no avail.

Currently, the only print ready HTML to PDF processor that I know is Prince [1] and to a lesser extent Firefox.

[1]: [https://www.princexml.com/](https://www.princexml.com/)

<comment><USER22> Prince is awesome. Its support for paged media has impressed me again and again.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Headless chrome is awesome. I'm using it to generate multiple PNG from SVG.

<comment><USER24> I agree with you but as a 'old' developer, I find it pretty sad that you have to fire up a headless browser + its gigaton of code, to convert a SVG to PNG. But I agree with you, headless chrome can be very useful.

<comment><USER16> I take your point in general, but I'm not sure this specific task - <USER4> of SVGs - has ever been one that has easily been solved by some tiny amount of code: probably the way I would have done this in the past (say, ten years ago) would have been using Apache Batik's rasteriser, which is far from a lightweight solution itself.

<comment><USER25> It's not _tiny_ , but in case anybody else is trying to do the same thing, I'd reach for librsvg ([https://wiki.gnome.org/Projects/LibRsvg](https://wiki.gnome.org/Projects/LibRsvg)).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Are there any similar wrappers around headless Firefox, which has been released recently (Firefox 55)?

Mozilla's documentation ([https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/Firefox/Headless_mode](https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/Firefox/Headless_mode)) is still incomplete.

<comment><USER27> I assume they're waiting for Servo

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> idea: using this as "send to kindle" generating pdfs from urls you stumble upon, and seamlessly sending them to the *@kindle.com email address to consume in the device

I don't know if there's an easier way or service these days

<comment><USER29> Instapaper did that pretty well, and I think Pocket Premium does that too - <USER5> MOBI format, which is much easier to read on the Kindle than PDF.

These days I use Calibre instead because the overall experience is better, but for single articles it's a bit overkill.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Interesting to compare this to some of the "old school" solutions for converting web pages to PDF such as htmldoc[0] or html2ps[1].

[0] [https://github.com/michaelrsweet/htmldoc](https://github.com/michaelrsweet/htmldoc) [1] [http://user.it.uu.se/~jan/html2ps.html](http://user.it.uu.se/~jan/html2ps.html)

<comment><USER31> The old school solutions lack any sort of javascript support (per the docs, htmldoc doesn't even support css), so they wouldn't work for a lot of real world websites. That's not really the same use case.

A better comparison would be against the likes of wkhtmltopdf[0], which uses webkit, or the pdf generation features of phantomjs.

[0] [https://wkhtmltopdf.org/](https://wkhtmltopdf.org/)

<comment><USER18> [https://github.com/wkhtmltopdf/wkhtmltopdf/issues](https://github.com/wkhtmltopdf/wkhtmltopdf/issues)

 _1,047 Open 975 Closed_

Yep, that's about how I remember it. It was such a pain to build on Windows (especially to get a single static binary) that people contributing fixes would often attain hero status by attaching a random binary to an issue. Specifically, GIF support was broken on the official Windows build for 4+ years:

[https://web.archive.org/web/20140917181225/http://code.googl...](https://web.archive.org/web/20140917181225/http://code.google.com/p/wkhtmltopdf/issues/detail?id=441#c41)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> I am guessing this works by splitting screenshots of a web page and gluing them as pages in the PDF file. Doesn't that mean the size of the PDF would grow to be large once it passes few pages? How does it handle content (like, tables) that don't have line breaks?

<comment><USER33> It uses Chrome's built-in print-to-PDF functionality via Chrome Debug/DevTools Protocol. In other words it creates PDF files with real vector graphics and text, not just images embedded in PDF.

Page.printToPDF: [https://chromedevtools.github.io/devtools- protocol/tot/Page/...](https://chromedevtools.github.io/devtools- protocol/tot/Page/#method-printToPDF)

<comment><USER32> I didn't know that existed. How good is it with corner cases? HTML->PDF is a notoriously difficult problem; even generating PDF is. There are several software services which charge well for doing that (Docraptor, PrinceXML). If it's smooth and handles everything well, is there any reason someone should pay for them?

<comment><USER18> PDF generation (especially from a JavaScript-enhanced HTML page) has enough corner cases that it is typically best implemented with commercial support paying someone to polish away the rough edges.

There are many "free as in beer" (closed-source), freemium, and/or free trial options offered as a carrot leading to a commercial product. Most have a watermark and/or page count limitations.

[http://selectpdf.com/community-edition/](http://selectpdf.com/community- edition/) (5 pages max)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Thank you very much. I'm excited to try it out. Great documentation, I wish more people would explain their project's software architecture in the README.

</comment><comment><USER35> How does this compare to wkhtmltopdf, which, IIRC, uses WebKit to render the pdf?

<comment><AUTHOR> We actually used wkhtmltopdf before we started using pdf-bot. wkhtmltopdf development has slowed a lot, it is very unstable and you need to run a 2 year old alpha version to support flexbox (if I remember correctly) :-) headless chrome is a lot more stable choice imo.

<comment><USER16> We had an absolutely ghastly time last year trying to implement wkhtmltopdf in a Rails app - we probably wasted an entire week fighting with both Wicked PDF and PDFKit before we just gave up and wrote something using Prawn instead (which was, of course, extremely time-consuming in a different way, but at least the end result was good).

<comment><USER36> What problems did you run into with wkhtmltopdf? We have been using it without much trouble. Chrome pdf generation is nice but wkhtmltopdf generates smaller PDFs with table of contents.

<comment><USER16> All kinds of problems that others have mentioned above, plus in terms of the Rails integration, it felt like we hit almost every one of the open issues on the GitHub repos for both Wicked PDF and PDFKit. I vaguely recall fonts in production being a problem, a general lack of reliability, performance issues, fiddling around with various different binaries of wkhtmltopdf to find one that maybe worked... probably other things besides. It was a bad week and I wish I hadn't reminded myself!

(With no disrespect, of course, to the authors of these libraries - they just didn't work well for us.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Can it generate a table of contents with page numbers?

<comment><USER38> calibre has been able to convert arbitrary HTML files to PDF with Table of Contents with page numbers, links, embedded fonts, arbitrary headers/footers for years, all rendered using WebKit, without a running X server, for years.

ebook-convert file.html file.pdf --pdf-add-toc

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> Whould this work on AWS Lambda?

<comment><USER40> Check out [https://github.com/adieuadieu/serverless- chrome#printtopdf-p...](https://github.com/adieuadieu/serverless- chrome#printtopdf-print-a-given-url-to-pdf)</comment></comment>