And apparently requires explicit WhatsApp user opt-in to be available. Meta is of course going to maliciously comply as best they can, so they've made sure interoperability is off by default and requires a specific opt in.
This is exactly the issue. Even if you ignore the privacy concerns, the reason ClawdBot/Moltbot/OpenClaude got so popular is that everything was actually run locally. The early adopters where people on locked down corporate networks where almost everything they need to interact with is in the category of "a local printer" (possibly a networked one).
Cloudflare simply cannot access anything most users will want to access. If it's not run locally, it simply won't work for most users.
Piled on top is the obvious data privacy issue. Most notably the credential privacy, but also the non-credential privacy and data collection.
Hard pass from me until there's a solution that covers all of these, including personal data privacy (and a "privacy policy" is no privacy at all).
Much better alternative, and I'm glad it works for the author's use cases. The developer use cases that rocketed ClawdBot/Moltbot/OpenClaude is the lack of integration necessary to use it though.
In most developer early adopter stuff, the things being accessed are often exclusively available from the one user's device. There is no cloud or internet access that can be setup or provided to any of the remote resources the user is trying to operate on. If the actions against the remote resources aren't exclusively executed to/from the user's device, the tool can't be used at all.
What were talking about here is that most of these users are in a corporate environment that they don't control. The corporate IT is intentionally locking down all access so only the user can access "internal" resources from thier company provided devices, and they can only interact in the ways allowed to that user. If you want to use an internet/cloud based server for something, it can only operate as an external processor or storage for the client. It will not be able to directly connect or do anything against any resources that are referenced in any actions.
That's the target audience for early adopters of tools like this. Once it's a widely adopted, then you start getting "official" integrations that may open up options. But until then, all actual actions, reads, etc must exclusively happen on-device.
The Akeyless integration for example only works if the Akeyless cloud server can directly access each thing you're authenticating to. That's not an option for most users.
The Slack integration is interesting, but not an option for most users either. OAuth into the corporate controlled Slack instance isn't going to be an option.
Also the current hardware has lots of overheating problems that hugely affect performance (you have to re-paste the heat sink to the CPU after only 2 years), and thier Bluetooth antenna is so awful it makes Bluetooth controllers for gaming completely unusable due to lag from lost/dropped packets (and the remote constantly disconnect and reconnect randomly).
It does seem sketchy, but you can kind of guess what it's cleaning based on the name in the uninstall command. I just skim down to the section that says it's for removing the launcher and reqd those, then run only a few.
The upside of the launcher thing is that you can setup a new default launcher and use it for a while without doing any adb. That let's you verify it's working for you first. And when you do finally remove the Google one, a lit if the ad and nloatware stuff no longer runs in the background even if you haven't removed it, so it's abh8ge perf0rmance benefit.
Actually you can double tap the home button on your remote to see all apps currently running, and can then click the close button on any one of them.
Google TV apps leak memory like a sieve, so it's pretty common to need to manually close all other apps to make the one you're trying to use work. Even !y wife just dies of now as soon as any one of the apps starts acting up.
Search a bit and you'll find how to install Projectivity/Projectivy Launcher that's way way better. For bonus points and a lot snapper functionality you can go the extra mile and use adb to remove the old Google Launcher and the related bloatware.
I've looked at this a few times, and AppleTV actually has pretty poor support unless you're only using a select few streaming services and not streaming any of your own content.
Shield performs exponentially better in every way except for the god awful stock interface (and Google data collection vs Apple data collection).
The hardware and tvOS still have extremely limited support for most video codecs, no support at all for audio pass thru, and very limited non-stereo audio options. If you want the equivalent of watching on your laptop it's good, but if you have better than stereo speakers, or a 4K TV that supports HDR10+ or Dolby Vision, AppleTV can't compete except for the big name streaming services that have special tvOS privileges/integration.
FWIW, I have no trouble playing any of my alternatively sourced media, 4K Dolby Vision included, using an app called Infuse. Pass-through audio may indeed be an issue for some lossless surround formats, or at least that's what it sounded like the last I looked into it some years ago. I don't have the right room to set up surrounds so it's stereo only over here anyway. But that said I love the app, lovely interface, etc.
When I tried that before, the Infuse UI was unusably show for me, likely due to the library size, streaming from my server hung for a long time, it had to transcode most of the time because so few codecs were supported and it only supported stereo audio output. DV wasn't supported at all at the time.
It sounds like it's gotten better by a lot, but I'm curious whether you've had to pay for each newer version if Infuse. They were doing a "for life" purchase before, but that just meant the one major version number, and they were releasing new and EOL old major versions every 1.5-2 years at the time. It seemed like they were heading own the path of a monthly subscription payment model at the time
I had to look to remember, I'm on a $10/year subscription for "Pro". From looking at their page I'd say some codec support is under the Pro license. I know I haven't thrown anything at it that needed transcoding, but I'm not playing anything exotic either.
Being annual and pretty cheap I really don't mind throwing them some money to continue development, it's worth it to me for the experience. I can't tell from the website but I feel like there's a monthly option if ya just want to test the waters.
I stream all of my own content with an Apple TV and Plex just fine. I don't know what problems you've had there. It even handles exotic stuff like Hi10P h.264.
How's your surround sound? tvOS 26 decided at the last minute not to support audio pass thru, which means only the pretty basic audio codecs that the AppleTV itself can decode are supported. That's an extremely limited number, and I believe only the very basic 5.1 is supported for any surround options.
The unfortunate part is that CoreELEC only works when you get all your content from a locally attached disk. You can't even really stream it from your beefy NAS/server, and you definitely can't use any streaming services.
I'm constantly surprised how many people are in that narrow category of just dipping thier toe in the water for "self-hosted" content that it's little enough it fits on disk storage you can have in your living room (mine is a half-height server rack in the basement), but also have progressed past thr point of using any streaming services. I guess there are a lot of people without families that also never travel out there.
> The unfortunate part is that CoreELEC only works when you get all your content from a locally attached disk. You can't even really stream it from your beefy NAS/server
This is not true. Streaming from a NAS at high speeds is fully supported and works fine. I would suggest to use NFS over SMB though, SMB gives me issues for higher bitrate content
Streaming apps do indeed not work. It's a device for local / NAS media playback.
I used it with plex (in kodi) just fine. With that said, I'd agree that its mostly for local media (where local can be whatever plex can get to). Outside of plex, either you are using plain kodi or some simple kodi extensions (say youtube) that just aren't as nice to use as their android app equivalents (in regards to streaming services, it does support MLB.TV for those that like baseball, but again, not quite as nice an experience IMO as the android app).
Him, I hadn't tried running it myself, but I couldn't find any indication if anyone using it for Plex (or equivalent). I only saw people going thru complicated schemes to Terry and setup network shared drives, or directly attaching external harddrives. I stand corrected.
If my entire world was plex, I probably would have kept it as my main device, but I really like a lot of the android streaming apps i use and the experience in kodi land just isn't as good when it exists.
You unfortunately lose Widevine support when you do this though (either switching to LineageOS or a mini-PC). That means you can't stream any of the mainstream services in anything like a half-decent quality.
It's very unfortunate that every streaming service has given up on supporting anything except Google-fied Android and Apple iOS/tvOS. I dont like the services to begin with, but a fully Jellyfin stack can only get you so far when there are niche requests involved as well.
That's the kicker I'm pointing out. It's a very limited number of people that agree.
If you're satisfied with the equivalent of 6-12 DVDs worth of content, or are only pulling the latest of a handful of shows and deleting them once watched, that's about all most people's setups will be able to store. But just like when streaming first started, people appreciate the 100s of TB of content from the streaming services and usually want that level of access.
I have 40+ TB on a >100TB system and we still use Netflix, HBO, or AppleTV+.
At this point I actually don’t know why I bother with the streaming services anymore. I recently watched a blu ray movie after a long time of just watching streams and the quality of the picture just blew me away.
Is there even Blu-ray level content available for series that are streaming only? Or is it restricted to just movie releases?
Edit: actually, now that I think of it, having the audio available in our local language instead of English is a boon for the kids. But otherwise, I don’t know why we bother.
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