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  • Plz do not kill DLNA , think about adding SMB!

You know what? Forget EVERYTHING I said last night in the other thread about the UI. If the plan is honestly to do away with streaming downloaded files over users' local networks altogether, then don't even worry about the UI, because SLR will barely have a user base left at that point for it to even matter if the UI ever becomes less clunky.

Now I feel like I shouldn't have even bothered typing all of that out, because this is about the dumbest, most shooting-onesself-in-the-foot-ish move these guys could possibly do to themselves. Utter naive idiocy to think that a majority of their current/prospective customers are going to be satisfied with only the option to stream over internet. Even living in an area with excellent infrastructure and a gigabit fiber connection and literally NOTHING else in my house using any measurably-notable bandwidth, there are times when even a 2min preview comes with a couple of hesitations & down-rezzing. Give me a break. Nobody is dumping money into VR headsets and GPUs to drive them(and, for most of us, storage space for locally-networked media), only to have someone try to tell them that they're going to have to settle for being bottlenecked by their internet availability/reliability(which, in most cases, aren't even up to the consumer), as well as that of the streaming servers themselves(which, again, don't always seem up to the task as is...but, sure, let's just push the entire user base to it...). And, for the record, no, it's not "everyone" who's moving in that direction, at least certainly NOT YET. That's just you trying to do that. Most other players with that functionality(which is most of them) aren't even remotely discussing removing it. And, unless your larger/longer-term goal is to just put all of your eggs into the SLRO basket and you're trying to exclusively become just another full-time VR studio which offers online streaming of its own videos(which is indeed what I now suspect is the case), it's a terrible, terrible decision.

    dexter313 I just would like to throw some solace in the mix. HTTP streaming will still work. It's real easy to set this up and many many apps available to do this. Or even write your own. - I personally do local/home network streaming all the time with DeoVR and without using DLNA.

    I just can not suggest you 3rd party tools or apps in case you suffer data loss or damages.

        floydian022 To be fair, streaming only platforms are today among the biggest companies in the tech industry. Most people can name you 5 or more off the top of their head without googling. - Our usage numbers also confirm there is a lot more streaming than downloading on SLR. And of the ppl whom download, it are largly people whom download as much they can for as little spending they can. - We have to pay quite a lot of money for downloads with little to no return.

            Rakly3 OK, but you're not them. So, your plan all along was really just to be an aggregator/reseller of other studios' content for just long enough to build yourself enough of a user base and reputation(and cash flow) to springboard yourselves to trying to be another WankzVR or BadoinkVR? I mean, sure, it makes total sense from a financial standpoint. But, sheesh, way to bait-and-switch your oldest & most loyal customers. Good luck with that.

              When I saw this topic headline (here and on reddit), I almost couldn't believe that it could be true. Why would SLR/DeoVR want to alienate so many avid VR fans and consumers with removing one of the most convenient way to consume media? DLNA is not just popular for VR, it's popular for any network entertainment setup. But it's 10x more crucial for VR fans, ESPECIALLY those on Quest and the likes.

              Part of the allure of DeoVR is that it has so many options and functions. And SLR shouldn't underestimate that. Part of the reason why SLR/Deo became popular was that it was the "go to" for VR porn consumption. But if you take DLNA away, what you are left with are folks that either don't care about scripts, or don't subscribe to any other VR studios. And no matter how giant SLR is right now, nearly every active VR member I know of (on reddit, and on all the other studio forums and discords) are subscribers for way more than one studio. Taking DeoVR/DLNA out of the picture will 100% take customers away.

              Right now, SLR is a happy medium, a home base for everyone to come and consume together. Whether you stream, download and watch locally, download or watch DLNA, whether you watch with scripts, etc. I honestly can't fathom how pushing one way of consumption on all your users while pushing thousands of upset customers out is the right call.

              Rakly3 Yeah, that's gonna be a hard pass. There's plenty of other players out there(again, that would be most of them) which don't need any additional kludging simply to play media from their locally-networked storage. The whole appeal to SLR was that it was a sort of one-stop shop, which incorporated an easy-to-use UI that piggybacked off of a player people already liked(DeoVR) with a bunch of content from different providers. Well, the UI has recently been made way less easy-to-use, and now it seems apparent that it's only a matter of time before you aren't offering any other content besides SLRO vids. And now, for the cherry on top, you're just going to go ahead and try to force people with 3080's and 8k headsets(but who happen to live in areas where they can't get much beyond DSL or basic residential cable internet) to depend on their ISPs and your severs to deliver that content smoothly(which, again, has already proven to be a unicorn scenario at times).

              Seriously, if you can't look at even your recent mess with just hundreds of videos getting de-registered and pulled all of a sudden(and then telling your customers to be patient while you go through a painstaking manual process of reviewing/re-registering them one-by-one) and understand why folks might be wary of paying for a subscription to a streaming service on which, at a whim, their favorite videos might just inexplicably vanish, well, you go ahead and write off all of those "people whom download" and blindly trust your usage numbers and see how that works out for you.

                Rakly3 To be fair, streaming only platforms are today among the biggest companies in the tech industry. Most people can name you 5 or more off the top of their head without googling.

                Your talking about sites that stream a max of 4k across a 2d screen? We're talking about 3d 6K-8K videos? You need high end fiber web to consistently stream videos and scripts and not have drops..? Their is not even infrastructural majority or a precedent yet on this kinda of streaming tech.. Most people don't, can't, or are able to get that nor should you be forced to even if you can smh it's porn not rocket science

                Rakly3 And of the ppl whom download, it are largly people whom download as much they can for as little spending they can.

                I spent $1000 for a lifetime sub to download scripts/videos and occasionally stream.. I don't think that's spending "as little as I can"

                Always been a huge supporter of SLR both here and on socials. But going off what's happened to videos and sign up terms being altered under the radar recently. Added with the comments here by staff and Reddit SLR has apparently become very shady.

                      dexter313

                      I spent $1000 for a lifetime sub to download scripts/videos and occasionally stream.. I don't think that's spending "as little as I can"

                      Then I was obviously not talking about you. ;-) - I said OF the people whom download, most of them are ...
                      This is not explosively for SLR ofc, this is true for all studios.

                        I'd be interested to know what percentage of members are based in the US.

                        Internet speeds and lack of ISP competition is definitely a very real issue here outside of the metro areas- just a hunch but I would be curious to know if "downloaders vs streamers" as a % is higher in the US because of the generally shittier internet speeds. And as a result whether US members are going to be more affected by a drop in DLNA support. I know that's a huge part of why I prefer to download, even having "COX Gigabit Fuck You Pay Us" levels of internet I still have issues streaming from time to time.

                          Rakly3 How is forcing the use a clunky web browser of solace to anyone? DLNA is a much better solution for local media streaming.

                          Rakly3 Reading between the lines, this looks like an attempt to force customers into streaming and consequently maintaining an active subscription.

                          I feel like that will backfire massively because you are underestimating just how many customers or potential customers around the world have bad internet connections that are not suitable for smooth streaming of 8K or even lower resolutions. Even with a connection that is fast enough, but not super fast, the experience could still suck. Other devices in a household may be cutting into some of that bandwidth (e.g. if someone else were streaming Netflix at the same time), causing pauses from buffer underruns. Seeking through a video will be slow all the time anyway because of the latency and buffering involved. None of that is an issue when users are able to download and stream locally.

                          For many the removal of DLNA would be a big downgrade at best or straight up unusable at worst.

                                spacepirate

                                How is forcing the use a clunky web browser of solace to anyone? DLNA is a much better solution for local media streaming.

                                It's just like using SLR site with DeoVR. Not a web-browser.

                                Reading between the lines

                                You don't need to read between the lines for that. SLR markets itself as a streaming platform.

                                you are underestimating just how many customers or potential customers around the world have bad internet connections that are not suitable for smooth streaming of 8K or even lower

                                It's not like downloads have been taken away. With 30 downloads per 72h you can still download more than the whole library of any other studio. it's roughly 900 downloads per month. If we put no limit on the downloads, we'd be bankrupt. People whom download a lot is a net loss on income. Massive bandwidth costs with next to no income. Having subscriptions is how all streaming platforms work as otherwise they couldn't exist.

                                BTW, I'm not yelling or fighting with you guys, just trying to explain.
                                Also, running a bit ahead of the facts, As time progresses and VR becomes more and more mainstream, the content delivery and hosting will improve, there already are encoding techniques to make the files even smaller, or same size with better quality. The current hardware is just not powerful enough yet.

                                    justsomedude101

                                    affected by a drop in DLNA support.

                                    This is what I've been trying to say. You don't really need DLNA to use your downloaded content over your home network with SLR/DeoVR.
                                    DLNA is a protocol. As is HTML
                                    DeoVR will always support HTML or the app is useless otherwise. Instead of setting up a DLNA server, you can set up a HTML webhost. - To be clear, I'm not talking about using a web-browser, this still works with DeoVR/SLR as you are used to.

                                        Rakly3 I feel somewhat relief after hearing this as I can never stream without stuttering.I would be very grateful if you could demonstrate how to set up a HTML webhost for this purpose (in detail as I am unfortunately not at all technically minded,sorry).

                                          As a DeoVR product owner DLNA is my major concern.

                                          We get multiple support requests that DLNA is not working properly that often follows with negative app reviews. In most cases we are not able to replicate any such issue. Because we rely on unique setup of each user so badly we are not able to make it work for everyone even if we would go for it.

                                          Every day DLNA generates us support requests and negative reviews we are not able to address. We are experiencing a terrible staff shortage that makes it stressful for everyone and it only gets worse over time.

                                          I feel all the frustration and I would like to keep the feature if there would be a chance for it. Please understand it's not sustainable for us any longer.

                                            Rakly3 It's just like using SLR site with DeoVR. Not a web-browser.

                                            How?

                                            Unless I'm missing something, you would still need to use the built-in browser to browse a web page. That is clunky compared to the current DLNA experience. You can only get the nicer SLR-style native interface if your HTTP server hosts a JSON file using DeoVR's custom manifest format, which almost no software supports.

                                            That means a customer, who just wants to watch their porn, is forced set up a HTTP server and to write software to build a JSON file with the correct content and DeoVR format. I don't understand how you think this is an adequate replacement for DLNA which is simple to set up, supported by plenty of 3rd party software and just works.

                                            Rakly3 It's not like downloads have been taken away. With 30 downloads per 72h you can still download more than the whole library of any other studio. it's roughly 900 downloads per month. If we put no limit on the downloads, we'd be bankrupt. People whom download a lot is a net loss on income. Massive bandwidth costs with next to no income. Having subscriptions is how all streaming platforms work as otherwise they couldn't exist.

                                            Going forward, are downloads going to remain even for newly released scenes? With streaming being pushed so heavily there is a legitimate concern that things will become streaming only. Any clarification here would be appreciated.

                                            It's totally reasonable for SLR to have the download limit to prevent abuse by the minority who go crazy with downloads and I have no problem with that.

                                            BTW, I'm not yelling or fighting with you guys, just trying to explain.

                                            The problem is that no one from SLR has given any satisfactory justification for why a perfectly good feature, that many users are dependent on, is going to be removed from the app. Can you please explain? EDIT: Nevermind, Aesthetics explained

                                                  Aesthetics Instead of taking the drastic step of removing DLNA, why don't you reduce the number of ways that people can shoot themselves in the foot?

                                                  At the moment everyone is rolling their own DLNA solution using different approaches, different software, different configuration. Add on top of that the fact that many people don't understand anything about this stuff or how to troubleshoot issues and it's a recipe the trouble.

                                                  To fix this you could publish a DLNA setup guide that explains one or two proven, reliable, supported ways to set it up (e.g. Windows and a Mac version with step by step instructions and images). Even better if it's accessible from within the app so that people can immediately find help when they encounter difficulty.

                                                  Makes no sense to drastically reduce the usefulness of your app and enrage many otherwise happy users over something like this.