Roku Developer Program

[enter0]

I received an email this morning telling me that my channel has major issues on the Roku HDMI Stick 3500X, Roku XS 3100X, and Roku TV 5303X (the issues vary across devices but they are hard crash level serious).  Things like the app crashing when you try to open a video, or when you press OK while a video is playing.

We have exclusively been using a Roku TV 5408X for testing and haven't noticed these problems (and the email notes specifically that there are devices which don't have these issues)--outside of buying all these different Roku devices and testing across all of them, is there any way to know whether these are hardware or firmware differences, or a combination of the two, or something else entirely, and recognize how to account for them?

I presume that if the issues were entirely related to firmware version they would just say it doesn't work on firmware prior to X version rather than discussing specific hardware setups, but I didn't realize there were such large differences across different Roku hardware.

[squirreltown]

"enter0" wrote:
I didn't realize there were such large differences across different Roku hardware.

It's a problem. Most of the discussions here have recommended having at least 2 or 3 boxes covering the different levels of performance. Then there is the separate issue of the hardware being different. There really is no other positively sure way than seeing your code running on that platform. I have a 3100, 4200 and 4640, and that's been enough for me, but I only build screen savers.

[Komag]

I have 7 or 8 Roku models to test performance across the board.

[enter0]

"squirreltown" wrote:
I have a 3100, 4200 and 4640, and that's been enough for me, but I only build screen savers.

"Komag" wrote:
I have 7 or 8 Roku models to test performance across the board.

Thanks for the replies!

Do you guys know the major hardware differences across models to be aware of? i.e. is it probably a memory limitation or something, or do devices vary somehow in the way certain Brightscript operations actually work? The latter seems ridiculous but I also would have expected performance of Roku's proprietary language to be more standardized across their own hardware.

I guess I'm just a little mystified as to why an app that works fine on my end would crash when attempting to load a video on certain other setups. Especially because the core of the app (including playback and content selection) relies pretty heavily on the code included by Roku themselves as a template in their Eclipse plugin.

[Komag]

I'm working on a game heavily using the 2D API, and the main differences between Roku models for me are memory (which directly affects available texture memory) and processor speed. Also, some Rokus handle the graphics differently, so it's a combination of CPU and GPU speed. I've never dealt with video so I couldn't say what might be affecting your situation.