Hobbies - Motorcycles

I noticed that when using the oficial MotoGP app on our Android TV, quite a lot of frames are being dropped.
The TV and the wi-fi it uses are fine - Netflix never drops a frame and other streaming services look pretty good too.
Switching from wi-fi to a wired network improves things a bit, but not much.
And it's not as if the bitrate of the MotoGP stream is too high; I see compression artifacts all over the place, more than with any other streaming service.

What does work is to cast the video from a phone. Still not dropped-frame-free, but much better.
Sometimes I wonder what the point of Android TV apps is actually; either they perform worse than simply casting (MotoGP) or they just don't work on our Philips TV (F1 TV)...

The "I Watch Too Much Racing" blog provides calendars for MotoGP, Formula 1, etc. You can easily import these into Google Calendar, Apple iCal, Microsoft Outlook, etc. Works like a charm and saves a lot of typing and maintenance! :-)

This is OLD info:

I use the Spoiler Free page at MotoGP.com as my start page for that site.
That page works fine - it indeed doesn't spoil anything about the races - but the layout is very irritating. The buttons are way too large, so that on a 1920x1080 display (my laptop) you cannot even read the text without scrolling.

This Tampermonkey script resizes the buttons to something useable - see the examples. You could play around with font sizes etc. to optimize it further, but this is good enough for me.

// ==UserScript==
// @name         MotoGP
// @namespace    http://tampermonkey.net/
// @version      0.1
// @description  try to take over the world!
// @author       You
// @match        https://www.motogp.com/en/videos/spoiler+free
// @grant        none
// ==/UserScript==

(function() {
    'use strict';

function addGlobalStyle(css) {
    var head, style;
    head = document.getElementsByTagName('head')[0];
    if (!head) { return; }
    style = document.createElement('style');
    style.type = 'text/css';
    style.innerHTML = css;
    head.appendChild(style);
}

addGlobalStyle('.c-card { height: 165px ! important; }');
addGlobalStyle('.c-card { border: 4px darkred solid ! important; }');

addGlobalStyle('.c-card::after { display: none ! important; }');

})();

This is OLD info - the video quality is flash-free and very good these days:

Watching MotoGP (using Video Pass) on Windows is far from ideal, to put it mildly. It's sh*t really.
No matter what CPU power, video card, browser or internet speed I threw at it, it kept stuttering and dropping a lot of frames.

Cause is (of course, I should have known) Flash. Check out this info on Reddit on how to force using the (beta) HTML5 player, which is MUCH better:
Video Pass - TamperMonkey Script To Force HTML5 Video And Ditch Flash

Why they would insist on using Flash, which is obsolete and gives you a headache with all those dropped frames, is beyond me.
Even more puzzling is why they don't advertize the fact that they have a solution that actually works (even if it is still called a beta version)... It took quite some Googling to find this; and no mention of this anywhere on the MotoGP site itself. Weird.

Android TV

Links

OLD INFO - Spoiler Free

OLD INFO - Spoiler Free - Before and After

OLD INFO - video quality on Windows