Roku Developer Program

[canaws]

For el.wubo...

1. You are awesome for this!

2. Would flac support be hard to implement?

Thanks

[scrager]

flac would be virtually impossible since the Roku developers would have to implement it on the Roku. Roku has a limited set of file formats that it can play.

Another option would be to transcode your flac in to MP3. Again, very difficult and possibly beyond the scope of this simple channel.

[srankin]

FYI

Handbrake's AC3 Passthru for 5.1 Dolby Digital surround plays on the roku just fine.

cheers,

Sam

[canaws]

"scrager" wrote:
flac would be virtually impossible since the Roku developers would have to implement it on the Roku. Roku has a limited set of file formats that it can play.

Another option would be to transcode your flac in to MP3. Again, very difficult and possibly beyond the scope of this simple channel.

Gotcha. Thanks!

[el_wubo]

canaws and scroger:

In general, the challenge with supporting formats other than what the Roku supports natively isn't the conversion itself (there are great utilities and libraries for this) -- it's finding a way to do the conversion on all our supported platforms and using utilities that people are likely already have. I'm trying to keep the number of required downloads to a minimum so installation can stay easy. That said: Most of my music is flac so I have a lot of motivation to support this feature on at least linux at some point.

srankin:

Cool! Does that rule out that theory as being the cause of rebuffering problems? I haven't heard any video rebuffering issues reported with My Music but that's been a common complaint with video experiments on some of the other forum threads.

scrager:

My plan for implementing shuffle on the server side is to write a random walk directory traversal algorithm that prunes entire directories from the search as early as possible. With some tweaking, I think this can give something close to a uniform distribution of song selections in something approximating O(n) where n is the size of the shuffled-playlist and not the size of the collection. Obviously the shape of the directory tree will influence the time complexity of a random walk but I think it will work well for a typical music layout.

DeftOne and Dellsweig:

The player will support separate music and video directories with a top level menu for selecting between the two. However, if the thing you find in the "music directory" happens to be a video, the player will still play it as a video... I see no value in punishing people for putting the wrong file type in their music directory.

dellsweig:

No progress on the deeply nested MP3 problem. I'll get you a version soon with some more debugging output so we can try to troubleshoot the problem. Has anyone else experienced this?


Thanks all!

[ashes00]

el.wubo - Does your coding specify require that the last folder on the music directory (that is set in server config) be called music? (see example below)
Example: \\192.168.1.12\ash\Media\Music

I ask becuase I have tried with just media (see example below), and I cant play the music files.
Example: \\192.168.1.12\ash\Media

Thought I would ask becuase it seems to affecting my music playback. I have changed everyhing back to \\192.168.1.12\ash\Media\Music ,and its working again.

All - Is this an isolated issue or are there others that see same issue?

Thanks,
- Ash

[el_wubo]

ash:

Nope. Nothing about the server or client code assumes the word "Music" will be in your music directory. I'm surprised that you're seeing this.

I'm also surprised to see that network share paths (eg \\hostname\share) work at all! That's cool. You might try mapping the share to a drive letter and using that...

[ashes00]

el.wubo. Thanks for the quick responce. I am going to wipe everything, and start fresh with your most recent source code, and remove installed app from Ruko DVP, and reboot it. Hopefully i can get a good test bed to work from, and to try to recreate the issues while identifiying the variables.

In regards to \\hostname\share
Ya i was stoaked to see that it worked out. NOTE: to anyone trying this setup a remote share (NAS) as a "Mapped Drive", this will cause some lag on the computer everything "my comnputer" is clicked. This is becuase it has to fecth data from the remote storage device everytime. I try to avoid this when using slower bottom end NAS devices. All you should do is make sure that you "Server" A.K.A your desktop has full access to the remote share. When the roku player pulls the data, its actually the server that is pulling the data from the NAS, and then sending it to the Roku. Its kind of a lot of data to be moving around on a 54MB wifi connection but it works.

e.wubo- Keep you the great work sir!

[renojim]

"dellsweig" wrote:

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

If you're on a Windows machine, you can use a juction (http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb896768.aspx) to span drives. For example, in your Music folder you could use the following command:
junction Movies x:\SomePath\Movies
You'll see the "Movies" folder displayed in the mymusic channel.

-JT

[dellsweig]

"el.wubo" wrote:
canaws and scroger:

In general, the challenge with supporting formats other than what the Roku supports natively isn't the conversion itself (there are great utilities and libraries for this) -- it's finding a way to do the conversion on all our supported platforms and using utilities that people are likely already have. I'm trying to keep the number of required downloads to a minimum so installation can stay easy. That said: Most of my music is flac so I have a lot of motivation to support this feature on at least linux at some point.

srankin:

Cool! Does that rule out that theory as being the cause of rebuffering problems? I haven't heard any video rebuffering issues reported with My Music but that's been a common complaint with video experiments on some of the other forum threads.

scrager:

My plan for implementing shuffle on the server side is to write a random walk directory traversal algorithm that prunes entire directories from the search as early as possible. With some tweaking, I think this can give something close to a uniform distribution of song selections in something approximating O(n) where n is the size of the shuffled-playlist and not the size of the collection. Obviously the shape of the directory tree will influence the time complexity of a random walk but I think it will work well for a typical music layout.

DeftOne and Dellsweig:

The player will support separate music and video directories with a top level menu for selecting between the two. However, if the thing you find in the "music directory" happens to be a video, the player will still play it as a video... I see no value in punishing people for putting the wrong file type in their music directory.

dellsweig:

No progress on the deeply nested MP3 problem. I'll get you a version soon with some more debugging output so we can try to troubleshoot the problem. Has anyone else experienced this?


Thanks all!

ElWubo

Thanks for all your help.