Roku Developer Program

[DeftOne]

Go through the troubleshooting checklist in the README -- that pretty much covers the basics.

[onecaribou]

Excellent work!

Last night I got the server running on my D-Link DNS-323 NAS.

The initial retrieve is a bit slow, as is navigating back to my list of artists but that's probably due to the size of my library (65K songs). Playback seems to be working fine.

notes:

- I'm not seeing any album art at this point.

- Sorting - Not all my artists are displayed in alphabetical order. At least some seem to be sorted by the date I added/modified their folders on my NAS. Could this be a python/server issue on my system?

wish list:
- A high level menu that simplifies navigation - maybe something that sorts all the retrieved artists into 'folders' based on the first character of the artist name.

- Search for an artist/album/song etc.

- Support for non-english characters.


dream list:

- I have no expectation this will get done but I'd love to see this project integrated with the Firefly / mt-daap server (www.fireflymediaserver.org). Firefly is a robust cross-platform media server that happens to utilize a very similar feed/url GET mechanisms as your project here.

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Thanks for all your hard work! I'm really looking forward to testing the latest revision tonight.

[hammerpocket]

I can now report success on Mac OS X!:D The problem I had earlier was the path to Python. I had entered "/usr/local/bin" instead of "/usr/local/bin/python".

To make this easier for Mac users, could there be a way to choose your operating system so the initial configuration would not always default to the Windows paths (or just add a Mac-specific section to the Read Me)? For most Mac users the path for music would be "~/Music/iTunes/iTunes Music/".

Also: AAC encoded files don't play. Is that a hardware limitation or would it be possible to enable that?

[DeftOne]

AAC is listed as a supported audio codec in the SDK documentation. I'm guessing el.wubo just needs to add support for it in his channel application.

[calicommando]

I can't figure out where I'm supposed to click on springboard.vbs.

Sorry, I've been trying to find it for about a half hour. Am I stupid?

[hammerpocket]

"calicommando" wrote:
I can't figure out where I'm supposed to click on springboard.vbs.

Sorry, I've been trying to find it for about a half hour. Am I stupid?

If you downloaded and unzipped the media server, it is in the top level of the folder -- or directory or whatever it's called in Windows (netguy204-roku_media_server-xxxxxx).

[el_wubo]

hammerpocket:

Your suggestion regarding music paths on various platforms inspired me. I've updated springboard to make some reasonable guesses at defaults.

Music Folder

On windows the default music folder will be My Music found under My Documents (Windows users: is this an acceptable default?)

On mac the default folder is ~/Music/iTunes/iTunes Music

On linux the default folder is ~/Music (where ubuntu puts it)

Server Ip

This is surprisingly tricky to guess because of the possibility of people having multiple network interfaces. I default to what the machine calls itself in its host file. On most configurations this will be the first network interface. Hopefully the default will work for most and not confuse those it doesn't work for.

Python

Once springboard is running your system knows where python is. I use path of the python interpreter that's running springboard as the default.

Port

8001 remains the default. I don't see any need to change it.

Regarding AAC: As I understand it the AAC format most often used by iTunes includes some very special DRM related encryption that the Roku is unlikely to support. Does anyone know if DRM free songs from iTunes are still in AAC? Also, the Roku only seems to support AAC audio when it's part of a video stream. It may be possible to rewrap the AAC audio into one of the video containers that the Roku can play but that will be somewhat difficult.

[el_wubo]

onecaribou:

That's so cool! What a great device to use as a personal media center. I'm excited that it worked!

Album art is only displayed for albums that contain a .jpg or .png of the art in the same folder as the mp3s. Did the albums you expected to see art for have this?

Good catch on the sort. The latest version now sorts your collection:
1st on album
2nd on track number (if available)
finally on track name

I like the idea of a high level view. Maybe when there are many items (> 30) the player could let you pick from (A - J ), (K - Z) or whatever partitioning scheme makes sense for your collection. I'll give that some more thought.

[calicommando]

AWESOME!!! I got it working. Thank you guys!

[dougrb]

"el.wubo" wrote:
dougrb:

Looks like the ID3 library (the code that figures out the artist and album names) wasn't able to handle one of your mp3's and took down the server in the process. I've added some error checking that will make it skip the problem mp3 an keep going. If you run springboard_debug.bat or launch_server_debug.bat it will print out which MP3 it skipped. This is in the latest version at the usual place.

That fixed it. Nice work!