Roku Developer Program

[Komag]

I've seen varying mentions of max channel size. I've read 750k, 2mb, and 50mb, which is it?

If possible I'd love to include everything for my game right in the channel without having to download anything on-the-fly every time people play. This mainly is about music, sfx, and "larger" graphics files.

[BradC]

something around 49 megs, it varies on the older devices. Newer ones can "swap" loaded channels, which kind of allows more, but not really.

in my opinion a large channel would be a horrible thing to do to users. There is limited storage space on these devices, and no way to install a channel on just one roku player (with microsd) if you have many players. You would be kind of screwing them over, and roku doesn't give users any way to know how much space channels take up before or after install (that I'm' aware of?)

Just my own opinion.


Most of my games are around 1-2 megs by design for this reason. There are plenty of ways to keep your pkg small. (that sounded bad) I have an upcoming sidescroller game kuglo with a ton of music, fx, and gfx that's around 4 megs, and again, a lot of work goes into keeping this file size to make sure users don't get boned by installing my channel.


If you have large graphics, experiment a bit with png, jpeg, etc. some images compress better with certain formats. A flat color image is a tiny PNG but not so much jpeg. Certain images compress really well as jpeg, no reason at all to include a 300k image when you can't see a difference with a 90k compressed jpeg. Music has a ton of room for compression but takes a little effort to optimize and can vary depending on the content.


Again, just throwing out my own opinion, doesn't mean it's any more correct than someone else's, just how I feel.

[TheEndless]

"Komag" wrote:
I've read 750k, 2mb, and 50mb, which is it?

750k and 2mb were the hard limits for the legacy players. 50mb is for players running the current firmware, but as BradC suggested, you should target as small as possible, unless you want to inconvenience your users.

[Komag]

"BradC" wrote:
... no way to install a channel on just one roku player (with microsd) if you have many players. You would be kind of screwing them over, and roku doesn't give users any way to know how much space channels take up before or after install (that I'm' aware of?)

Sounds like those would be useful features for users.
1. Ability to decide whether a channel should go to all their Rokus or just one
2. Option to see how much memory every channel is taking up, how much they have left, etc, just a simple memory management option.

"BradC" wrote:
I have an upcoming sidescroller game kuglo with a ton of music, fx, and gfx that's around 4 megs, and again, a lot of work goes into keeping this file size to make sure users don't get boned by installing my channel... (compression...)...

I'm aware of compressing images, and mine are mostly tiny, but what about music and sfx?
For sfx, are you using something other than 44.1khz, 16bit mono? Are you just keeping the sounds very short/brief? I tried 22050hz 8bit mono files, 1/4 the size, and they played and sounded fine, but I've read I'm asking for trouble if I deviate from 44.1khz, 16bit mono.
For music, I've been using Audacity to compress original files to WMA 44100hz, 64kbps with very good results and relatively small files, but still I have over 20mb of tracks - what are you doing to get your whole game under 4mb especially regarding music files?

[RokuMarkn]

"Komag" wrote:

2. Option to see how much memory every channel is taking up, how much they have left, etc, just a simple memory management option.

Local storage is just a cache, so there's not much meaning to the concept of "space left". For example, it's impossible to run out of channel storage space. At the least it would be hard to present this in a way that end users would understand it.

--Mark

[EnTerr]

"RokuMarkn" wrote:

"Komag" wrote:

2. Option to see how much memory every channel is taking up, how much they have left, etc, just a simple memory management option.

Local storage is just a cache, so there's not much meaning to the concept of "space left". For example, it's impossible to run out of channel storage space. At the least it would be hard to present this in a way that end users would understand it.

Won't make sense to show "space left" indeed.
But how about showing the channel bundle size (e.g. "Size: 0.7 MB" in channel info on the player and in the web store)?

iOS AppStore, Google Play store, Windows Phone store all do it. And Apple's and Microsoft's are two references i use as far as UX/usability goes.

[Komag]

I guess I don't understand how each Roku's "Memory" and "Channel Storage" works then. Most Rokus lately have 512mb memory and 256mb channel storage. How can the Roku never run out of channel storage space? Does the Roku "delete" channel files if the channel storage is full, and download files on-the-fly for the channel the user is trying to run?

So what would literally happen if 9 other developers and I each release a 40mb game and someone buys and installs all 10 of them, 400mb total? How about 50 such games, 2000mb total?

[EnTerr]

"Komag" wrote:
Does the Roku "delete" channel files if the channel storage is full, and download files on-the-fly for the channel the user is trying to run?

Yes, that's what happens. Except it works at "bundle" granularity - i.e. deletes or downloads the whole package and not individual files from a package.

[Komag]

Hmm, so theoretically, if all channels were 50mb, the user would have just the 5 most recent channels currently downloaded, and if he wanted to open a 6th channel, the Roku would delete the bundle for the least-recently-opened channel, download the new one, and now once again have the 5 most recently opened channels on the Roku.

[Basil]