Roku Developer Program

[renojim]

This is great! Not only did the davethomas video play fine, it's handled everything I've thrown at it including the first half of the Broncos/Ravens game - a 2GB, 5MB/sec, 54 minute video. It has rebuffered a couple of times, but that probably has more to do with my wireless network than anything. I wouldn't normally try to play a 5MB/sec video. Come next football season I expect to get a lot of use out of this feature watching downloaded Ravens games!

This is a feature Roku should seriously consider adding, with compensation to el.wubo of course. To be honest, I haven't been too impressed with its ability to stream Netflix movies. At times I've wanted to throw it out the window when I missed something and wanted to rewind the last few seconds. Its inability to do a decent rewind/fast forward can be extremely frustrating. Maybe I just need a 54Mbs internet connection. 😄 Maybe Roku cold hire el.wubo to work on their firmware. 😉 With this feature, I'm actually considering getting another Roku player to stream media to another room.

For anyone interested, I've just been using the CLI version of HandBrake to convert my files to the m4v format. It does a good enough job for me with just the default settings. Just make sure to add the -O option:
HandBreakCLI -i infile -o outfile.m4v -O

el.wubo, the next time I'm in Baltimore I'd like to buy you a beer!
-JT

[renojim]

el.wubo,

On the subject of jpeg support, I think you hit the nail on the head with two good ideas. The ability to just automatically cycle through all the jpegs in a directory, repeatedly even, while playing music would be a great feature. At the same time, being able to manually cycle through photos with or without music would also be nice. I get your point about the lousy resolution of a TV, but if anyone out there is like me, I tend to look at the pictures I've taken when I upload them to my computer and then never really look at them again. Being able to display them on my TV I'm sure would make me more likely to enjoy them over and over again. I think it would be at least as good as one of those tiny digital photo frames.

Like you said, I could see someone putting together a showing of their vacation photos, perhaps even with narration timed to the cycling of the photos. I don't know if I'd like to watch something like that and I'm certainly too lazy to put something like that together, but I could still see it happening.

-JT

[dellsweig]

"el.wubo" wrote:
renojim and all:

I've just pushed out the update that lets the server stream from disk instead of read the entire file first. Great catch to renojim for suggesting this was the issue.

All of my test videos (even those with metadata at the end) are starting in under 10 seconds. This update is in both the main and the partitioning version.

renojim:

You got the right zip. The random looking characters on the end correspond to the version of the zip you're downloading. With this number in hand you can click on the "commits" link and find that version number to view the source tree for that particular zip file. The latest version is 6b8b472a75c8ac7fba59b5f22e5f08e3e9f1437b (at least, right now) so you'll see the first few characters of that on the end of the zip file you download. More more exciting details on how this crazy looking version number comes about (it's a SHA1 hash), check out the git documentation.

all:

I'm definitely catching on that photo support is something everyone would like to have. Since I really don't get the value of this feature, can someone enlighten me? How would you use this? Here are the use cases I've dreamed up:

* You want to leave something cool running on your TV (like a screen saver)
--In this, auto-cycling is important and something like being able to still quickly select music to play along with your cycling pictures would be valuable

* You want to show off pictures of your vacation to a group of people
--In this case, manual cycling is important and maybe we'd want to explore associating music with collections of photos for more of a slide show / presentation type feel.

* You actually like looking at low resolution pictures on what amounts to a junky monitor 😉 (j/k)
--Hm... maybe this is actually something people do with their leisure time and would like to be able to do it from their television.


Thoughts? Votes? What matters to you?

ElWubo

A simple method of letting my wife peruse the photo library on my file share is all I am asking.

All photos are already in folders, much as the music collection, organized by topic/date/etc

A simple way to navigate to the folder then click for next photo would be great. Thumbnails even for quick navigation....

Simple is better - no need for association with music or anything tacky like that.

Also - Any luck on finding the issue with the deeply nested mp3 files not playing?

[ashes00]

I was able to download latest source, and get my roku to play .mp4 videos from my desktop/NAS. It played more than 30 minutes,and was actually one that came form DVDRip (512MB). SO length and large video size are covered. I am going to work on it later this eveing to see about over mp4/m4v videos.

This is great stuff you guys are doign here. I do like the idea of changing it to "My Media" as it has started to encompass more media types. jpeg would be nice.

One last question. Has the shufflle function been looked at any further on music? Last i was able to get working was just playing the mp3s in sequential order and only from one container folder. Shuffle would be great, as we could listen to all types of artists, and not just what we have drilled down to.

Again thanks for everything thisis amazing!
-Ash

[dellsweig]

"ashes00" wrote:
I was able to download latest source, and get my roku to play .mp4 videos from my desktop/NAS. It played more than 30 minutes,and was actually one that came form DVDRip (512MB). SO length and large video size are covered. I am going to work on it later this eveing to see about over mp4/m4v videos.

This is great stuff you guys are doign here. I do like the idea of changing it to "My Media" as it has started to encompass more media types. jpeg would be nice.

One last question. Has the shufflle function been looked at any further on music? Last i was able to get working was just playing the mp3s in sequential order and only from one container folder. Shuffle would be great, as we could listen to all types of artists, and not just what we have drilled down to.

Again thanks for everything thisis amazing!
-Ash

Have not seen the latest version so this point may be mute but

Are there separate base folders/paths for music and video (and photos?)

[DeftOne]

"dellsweig" wrote:

Have not seen the latest version so this point may be mute but

Are there separate base folders/paths for music and video (and photos?)

No, there aren't. I just re-arranged the folders/files on my hard-drive to separate things out for the time-being.

\Media\Music\<Artist>\<Album>\<Song>
\Media\Video\<Movie>

So, in this setup \Media is the base directory I used in the config.

Doesn't really matter to me if el.wubo adds another directory in the config for video and/or photos. I can just re-arrange the folders/files on my computer to compensate.

[dellsweig]

"DeftOne" wrote:

"dellsweig" wrote:

Have not seen the latest version so this point may be mute but

Are there separate base folders/paths for music and video (and photos?)

No, there aren't. I just re-arranged the folders/files on my hard-drive to separate things out for the time-being.

\Media\Music\<Artist>\<Album>\<Song>
\Media\Video\<Movie>

So, in this setup \Media is the base directory I used in the config.

Doesn't really matter to me if el.wubo adds another directory in the config for video and/or photos. I can just re-arrange the folders/files on my computer to compensate.

Personally I would rather have different base folders as my different media types are on different drives on my file server.

[DeftOne]

"dellsweig" wrote:

Personally I would rather have different base folders as my different media types are on different drives on my file server.

Good point. I never thought of that scenario, since I've got all my media on one drive. Different base directories for each media type would give the most flexibility, for sure.

[scrager]

I'm not trying to speak for wubo, but I see some problems with a shuffle method.

This channel is designed to be incredibly simple. Basically you tell the server a directory you want to look at, the server gives the roku a list from the current directory. You select a file to play and it plays. With music, files play sequentially.

A shuffle feature will require either
A) Server reads multiple directories to get a list of all files, randomizes them, sends list to roku.
B) database that maintains list of all files that can be queried and return a random order list.

A will cause a heavy load on the server and will not scale well at all.
B will be more complex and require more setup and some way to maintain the database. B would probably not be suitable for mass distribution in the way that this simple channel is.

For those looking for a search feature, you'll have the same sort of complexities. There is no central list of media to search on, so search will either require a database (complex) or require a lot of local reads (not scalable).

Playlists would probably be a little simpler. You could define a file format to point to media you want in the list. The server can then read that file and generate a list of the media in it. This would probably be easier to do than shuffle or search, but it is also more complex than the simple directory structure that this channel is reading.


I have some ideas for a more complex channel/server combination, and I will probably start down that path, but I don't think it will be distributable to the masses due to the server setup and maintenance required.

[hammerpocket]

Just an FYI: I don't know how many people are aware that most -- if not all -- YouTube videos are available in h264-encoded mp4 files. (That's how devices without Flash, like the iPhone, are able to access YouTube.) There is an extension for Firefox called Download Helper (there may be others) that make it easy to download the mp4 file from a YouTube page. If you simply change the file extension to m4v, these files will play nicely through the Roku using this My Music/My Media app.