Roku Developer Program

[TheEndless]

"belltown" wrote:
I was wondering about the HTML5 thing, although I didn't think the Roku was powerful enough for that. According to Anthony Wood:

'Tis true, which is why you and I can't do it, but we know the new Netflix is HTML5 (using their own custom web engine), and I'm 95% sure YouTube is (http://www.youtube.com/tv).

"EnTerr" wrote:
Can roImageCanvas draw anything else but images and text (i.e. lines, rectangles)?
Also the TargetRotation property - does it support arbitrary angles or only multitudes of 90?

It's been a long time since I wrote that channel, but it can do rectangles (and rectangles that look like lines). No triangles or other shapes, and I seem to recall TargetRotation being limited to 90 degrees, but I'm not positive about that.

[EnTerr]

"belltown" wrote:

"EnTerr" wrote:
How can you distinguish if something is using roScreen vs roImageCanvas?

r2d2_bitmaps

[belltown]

"EnTerr" wrote:
Can roImageCanvas draw anything else but images and text (i.e. lines, rectangles)?

I used lots of lines and rectangles here, and text and images: http://forums.roku.com/viewtopic.php?f=28&t=46890&start=15#p452411

The downside of using roImageCanvas for something like that (at least the way I implemented it), is the amount of time it takes to render all the lines (which are really very thin rectangles), and draw all the text. In that example, you can page through the screens vertically, but there's a noticeable (or irritating, depending on who you talk to) lag while the next page is rendered. The advantage of roImageCanvas is that it's much less work; I didn't have to do anything special to get the text lines to wrap within their enclosing rectangles, for example.

With roScreen you could render something like that a lot quicker, constructing the text and rectangle bitmaps ahead of time and use roCompositor and/or roRegion to achieve real, smooth scrolling - although it's a lot more complicated. NewManLiving is an expert on how to do all roScreen stuff.

[renojim]

"TheEndless" wrote:
...and I seem to recall TargetRotation being limited to 90 degrees, but I'm not positive about that.

Image canvas can do any rotation (see the Video Poker screensaver), but it's way too slow for any kind of animation.

-JT

[EnTerr]

"belltown" wrote:

"EnTerr" wrote:
Can roImageCanvas draw anything else but images and text (i.e. lines, rectangles)?

I used lots of lines and rectangles here, and ...[/url]

But how??
You have done it, TheEndless has done it - and i feel like an idiot because i cannot figure it out. It's not documented openly - i tried reading between the lines (http://sdkdocs.roku.com/display/sdkdoc/ ... +Meta-Data) and still nothing!
What am i missing. Or was documentation lost in translation?

[TheEndless]

"EnTerr" wrote:

"belltown" wrote:

"EnTerr" wrote:
Can roImageCanvas draw anything else but images and text (i.e. lines, rectangles)?

I used lots of lines and rectangles here, and ...[/url]

But how??
You have done it, TheEndless has done it - and i feel like an idiot because i cannot figure it out. It's not documented openly - i tried reading between the lines (http://sdkdocs.roku.com/display/sdkdoc/ ... +Meta-Data) and still nothing!
What am i missing. Or was documentation lost in translation?

horizontalWhiteLine = {
    Color: "#FFFFFFFF"
    TargetRect: {
        x: 100
        y: 100
        w: 500
        h: 1
    }
}

[belltown]

"squirreltown" wrote:

"belltown" wrote:
They all feel to me like they weren't really designed for the Roku platform, lacking the smoothness you could get with roScreen

This is what I can't figure out. One thing about roScreen is it can be really slick movement-wise, there's just no excuse to have stuff stuttering around, and yet a lot of these "partner" channels do just that. What are they actually building them with? I haven't seen anything that couldn't be duplicated with roScreen, so why don't they use it?

Portability.

I guess they're using code they've developed for other platforms. If there's some sort of HTML 5 SDK that only the privileged partners have access to that will run code they've already written, then it's a lot less work to port that existing code to the Roku, rather than start from scratch on a one-off implementation using a new language, a new API/SDK, and a new platform, that they most likely have had no previous experience with.

[EnTerr]

"TheEndless" wrote:

"EnTerr" wrote:
But how??
You have done it, TheEndless has done it - and i feel like an idiot because i cannot figure it out. It's not documented openly - i tried reading between the lines (http://sdkdocs.roku.com/display/sdkdoc/ ... +Meta-Data) and still nothing!
What am i missing. Or was documentation lost in translation?

horizontalWhiteLine = {Color: "#FFFFFFFF", TargetRect: {x: 100, y: 100, w: 500, h: 1}}

Looks simple enough!
How did you learn it - any documentation on that?
Maybe there also can be borders, circles, rectangles, poly-lines...

[tvjay]

"TheEndless" wrote:

'Tis true, which is why you and I can't do it, but we know the new Netflix is HTML5 (using their own custom web engine), and I'm 95% sure YouTube is (http://www.youtube.com/tv).

Do you know how make an app that just displays a webpage?

[andreV]

Is there any kind of container for items (images,texts,shapes) on imageCanvas or roScreen ? Something like html div, so you can place items inside this container and only change position of container not each item separately.