Is there not a reasonable way to watch VHX content on your TV?

Yup. This. :slight_smile:

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I opened the VHX website on my Android phone in the Chrome browser, hit play on an episode, and the media player in the browser has a cast button right on the bottom. This only casts the media and not my entire screen or my entire browser tab. I can cast to Chromecast, Nest Hub, Chromecast Ultra, and Chromecast with Google TV. It sounds like airplay for Apple is also working from the other replies here.

Have y’all tried turning it off and back on again?

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Ugh, to add insult to injury, I just tried to use VHX on my phone with Chrome, and cast it to the new Roku TV in my man cave, but VHX will not cast to it, even though YouTube has no problem. The only option I have now is to use the media pc I have connected to the TV in the living room to watch through the HDMI input. Unfortunately, as it is nearly Christmas, the girls have locked that TV down with sappy Christmas movies so not an option until they all go shopping, or time for go to bed.

Why VHX, Why?!

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I’d further this to: why bother with streaming/apps at all, including the Gizmoplex, when you can download the videos and have complete control over when/how you watch?

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Why download videos when they should be able to stream to our TVs using apps that were once available to do so?

See, anyone can play the why do this when you can do that game. Not everyone has the same setup/ ability to do what others seem to want them to “just do”. VHX may have once been a decent platform for this. As of now, they are not. Maybe it will be better with the Gizmoplex, but the current incarnation of VHX does not instill me confidence that it will be so.

I am not here to complain, I have Blu-rays coming eventually (hopefully near the same time as the Gizmoplex opens). I am here to let the powers that be know that the current process for streaming is not working for me, so please make sure the effort is made to right the ship before the Gizmoplex becomes available.

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Hard copies of S13 will deliver in or around January, 2023.

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I tend to download digital content and then transfer it to my “magic box” (streaming server) so that I can watch it on my TV. I’ve found that to be the easiest and fastest way for me.

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That’s fair, I was being a little snarky. I personally don’t care for streaming, but I get that others do. One option to consider is downloading them to a thumb drive, then plugging that directly into your TV. Almost every TV today will play MP4 this way. It’s still more trouble than streaming, but not much, and you can control it with your remote (instead of a computer) and it will work even if your internet goes out.

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I have an LG tv with a web browser, and I just logged into my VHX account and am now streaming Revenge of the Mysterons.

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Happy to hear there’s a workaround. I can be understanding of these things since I work in the software consulting sphere. But users are never happy with “Workarounds”. So I get it. But I’m happy to move on using a Console/TV/Blah blah browser.

Hey, anyone remember Internet TV from the early aughts? The kind where you had a kooky external keyboard and had to navigate websites using the keyboard’s arrow keys? No responsive design UX back then, everything was wonky. Certain images wouldn’t load. Certainly no streaming content to enjoy…

Just wanted to put our woes into perspective.

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If my internet goes out, I’m out. :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

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Internets can go out?

Oh, the horror!

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There, there. It’s just a nasty conspiracy theory.

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Yeah, I don’t see a VHX app available on my Roku.

Are we sure of that? Also, if they’re using VHX as their back end for video, doesn’t that give good reason to expect that if we’re having trouble getting VHX to talk to our TVs or even cast from a desktop browser to the TV, we’ll likely have the same problems when the Gizmoplex front end launches?

Yes. Don’t mean to knock the work you’ve put in or the favor you’ve done getting this out. Just trying to figure out what’s possible with it and what problems might need to be overcome as things continue to develop. And maybe even figure out how to make things work for myself and my fellow MSTies.

The issue is that people want to watch on their TVs. Because that’s why they have a TV. It’s a larger screen, and set up so you can watch with friends and family instead of staring at a small screen in your lap. So we’re trying to figure out how to make that possible. But, yes, as far as I can tell, the best option I have right now to do that is to download the ep to a USB thumb drive and plug that into the TV. Which is a little more cumbersome than is ideal when it seems like you should be able to do it more directly, but, in the scheme of things, not that big a deal.

In other news:

I haven’t used VHX before. Interestingly, the login I created for mst3k.vhx.tv does not work if I try to sign in to the vhx.tv front page. It’s only for the MST3K sub-site.

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No. If you look at the site, you can see that VHX’s niche is providing branded apps. There’s probably no money in them providing a generic VHX app—it might even undermine what they do which is

image

Beautiful branded apps.

24/7 support for you, and subscribers.

We develop, submit, and maintain apps for every platform. 100% approval rating.


In other words, they’re not in the business of providing generic access to videos, like YouTube (or Vimeo, for that matter). They’re in the business of (essentially) building Gizmoplexes.

This is a good thing: Let the MST3K crew make MST3K and let the video distributors distribute video.

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Ah, I see your point. That’s… interesting. So they’re not incentivised to make their content as portable as possible… until someone pays them to do that. It makes a weird kind of sense.

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It makes a lot of sense when you realize it’s either that or compete with YouTube, which exists solely to squeeze out anyone else from the market.

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No. VHX has an API that allows the developer to access videos with whatever app they develop. Every single complaint I have read is fixed by that. That Vimeo has a crappy app right now doesn’t mean that the 100s of developers out there using their API haven’t created apps that actually work for what we want the Gizmoplex to be. The VHX app, as far as I can tell, hasn’t been updated in 5 years. They are just focusing on selling the backend.
BTW, I have made several Roku, Twitch, and Amazon channels for clients, so I know a bit about how these systems work.
What Joel and the team released this week wasn’t a platform, it was access to download the episodes that backers had purchased. With the responses that some have made that was probably a bad idea, at least with the way that they announced it. On another forum I follow, it was up to crazy kill MST3K and everyone involved kind of hate. So it hasn’t been that bad here, or the posts were deleted.

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Huh. What forum was that?

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