Roku Developer Program

[cmcnulty]

"DeftOne" wrote:

How long are the videos that you've encoded with Handbrake using the settings you've described? Any of them longer than 1 hour? What source are you encoding from? I've tried just about every setting in Handbrake, and all the movies (DVD/VIDEO_TS source) I've encoded begin rebuffering fairly frequently after the 1 hour mark. There are others out there that have reported this as well. Just wondering if any of you have found the illusive magic settings to fix this problem. I wish the Roku DVP wasn't so finicky and restrictive with its supported encode settings.

Dang, up until now I had been watching 45 minute tv shows, but tonight I tried watching the Matrix and about an hour into it it started buffering, and then continued having to rebuffering at an increasing rate until it was basically unwatchable. I decrypted it from my own DVD using DVD Decrypter (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DVD_Decrypter) and then encoded it using Handbrake using the setting I mentioned earlier, Ipod + the webstreaming checkbox, with nothing else touched. One other point of information. Stopping the movie altogether, browsing out of the folder and then going back into it and resuming the movie from where I had left it did not change anything. Within a couple minutes it was already re-buffering.

I'd love to hear suggestions from other people about what settings they've used to encode to work around this issue. Let me know what info I can provide (and how to provide it) from my server or the Roku to anyone developing this to see if they can reproduce it.

[renojim]

"cmcnulty" wrote:

I'd love to hear suggestions from other people about what settings they've used to encode to work around this issue. Let me know what info I can provide (and how to provide it) from my server or the Roku to anyone developing this to see if they can reproduce it.

Try encoding at 29.97fps and let me know if that fixes it.

-JT

[hammerpocket]

"el.wubo" wrote:

"hammerpocket" wrote:

(2) I'm afraid that requiring PIL is going to cause headaches for OS X users. The package I found won't install, and even the steps I found to remedy the situation don't work. Ironically, I think installing the latest Python (which is part of the posted instructions for My Media) may be part of the problem.

Nuts! Well, I haven't invested too much time in the specifics of the resizing library. We'll just have to find something that works for everyone.

The problem may not be too hard to remedy if someone with more Unix experience can look at it. AFAIK there are only two or three Mac users currently following this thread, and I don't know if any of us are comfortable with the command line.

My understanding of the issue is this: OS X installs Python in a different location than the PIL installer expects (despite being an OS X-specific PIL package--strange). There installer says, "You cannot install PIL 1.1.5 on this volume. PIL requires System Python 2.4 to install." So the solution I found in a few blogs is to put a symlink to "Python.framework" in the "right" place. When I do the command to create the symlink, I get an error that the file exists. Looking at the contents of that directory, I see that the new version (2.6) of Python I installed in preparation for using My Media is installed there. So why doesn't the PIL installer recognize that Python install? I thought maybe by "System Python" it meant the version of Python installed by the operating system, but if that's the case, why does it not know where that version of Python is installed?

So maybe the solution is to uninstall the newer version of Python?

[myplanet]

This thread is mainly about setting up the channel and related issues/problems.

I wanted to start a new thread for tips & tricks (the opposite of problems), to share ideas that may help others trying this product. Yesterday I figured out how to see youtube videos on Roku, using Miro.

The new thread is here http://forums.roku.com/viewtopic.php?f=28&t=26321, if anyone is interested.

[el_wubo]

"hammerpocket" wrote:

"el.wubo" wrote:

"hammerpocket" wrote:

(2) I'm afraid that requiring PIL is going to cause headaches for OS X users. The package I found won't install, and even the steps I found to remedy the situation don't work. Ironically, I think installing the latest Python (which is part of the posted instructions for My Media) may be part of the problem.

Nuts! Well, I haven't invested too much time in the specifics of the resizing library. We'll just have to find something that works for everyone.

The problem may not be too hard to remedy if someone with more Unix experience can look at it. AFAIK there are only two or three Mac users currently following this thread, and I don't know if any of us are comfortable with the command line.

My understanding of the issue is this: OS X installs Python in a different location than the PIL installer expects (despite being an OS X-specific PIL package--strange). There installer says, "You cannot install PIL 1.1.5 on this volume. PIL requires System Python 2.4 to install." So the solution I found in a few blogs is to put a symlink to "Python.framework" in the "right" place. When I do the command to create the symlink, I get an error that the file exists. Looking at the contents of that directory, I see that the new version (2.6) of Python I installed in preparation for using My Media is installed there. So why doesn't the PIL installer recognize that Python install? I thought maybe by "System Python" it meant the version of Python installed by the operating system, but if that's the case, why does it not know where that version of Python is installed?

So maybe the solution is to uninstall the newer version of Python?

Gotcha. Yeah, looks like most packages are python2.5.

Luckily mac users should have the easy_install utility available. Open a terminal window and execute

sudo easy_install --find-links http://www.pythonware.com/products/pil/ Imaging

This should work for linux users as well.

[el_wubo]

"myplanet" wrote:
This thread is mainly about setting up the channel and related issues/problems.

I wanted to start a new thread for tips & tricks (the opposite of problems), to share ideas that may help others trying this product. Yesterday I figured out how to see youtube videos on Roku, using Miro.

The new thread is here http://forums.roku.com/viewtopic.php?f=28&t=26321, if anyone is interested.

Cool, a "tricks and hacks" community. I'm adding a link to the first post of this thread.

[el_wubo]

"canaws" wrote:

Wow. That's very odd. Can you send me (email) your my_media_log.txt file? Also, can you try looking in the feed xml and picking out a url from inside the <image></image> tags? Urls that end in .jpg are normal pictures and things that end in .mp3.image are images that are embedded in mp3's. Pasting either type of url into your browser should show you the image if things are working right. Make sure you get the entire file name though, including the '&key=music' bit.

Done and done. Check your email. 😃

I think I've fixed it. Checkout the latest early-release.

I wasn't opening the image files in binary mode so on windows the server was sending partial responses. Let me know if this solves your issue.

Thank you.

[cmcnulty]

"renojim" wrote:

"cmcnulty" wrote:

I'd love to hear suggestions from other people about what settings they've used to encode to work around this issue. Let me know what info I can provide (and how to provide it) from my server or the Roku to anyone developing this to see if they can reproduce it.

Try encoding at 29.97fps and let me know if that fixes it.

-JT

That did the trick. In researching it a bit more, I found this:

"http wrote:
However, understand that DVDs and other MPEG-2 video streams use inherently variable framerates. This means that the actual framerate is not a steady number. This doesn't matter in most cases--for example, iPods handle it well. But if you find that playback is jerky, you might want to experiment by specifying a particular framerate instead of using "Same as source."

which looks like a plausible explanation for what might be going on with the rebuffering (which would presumably be the Roku response to "jerkiness"). The whole page (http://trac.handbrake.fr/wiki/FramerateGuid) is definitely worth a read for anyone who, like me, is learning about this stuff for the first time.

On a slight tangent, when I replaced the "Same as source" encoded file with the 29.92 fps encoded one (also having stopped and restarted the My Media server) It still knew to start right back up where it left. Kudos for that!

On an even more different tangent, I've now saved the settings I used to encode as a Roku preset within Handbrake, however I can't see anyway to export them, or even where the presets are stored. ANyone know how to export handbrake presets?

[renojim]

"cmcnulty" wrote:


That did the trick. In researching it a bit more, I found this:

Glad to hear it! It's worked on all of my videos, but I sometimes have audio sync issues that I think weren't there when I encoded in the original framerate.

"cmcnulty" wrote:

http://trac.handbrake.fr/wiki/FramerateGuide

The trailing 'e' was missing on your link.

"cmcnulty" wrote:
On a slight tangent, when I replaced the "Same as source" encoded file with the 29.92 fps encoded one (also having stopped and restarted the My Media server) It still knew to start right back up where it left. Kudos for that!

Thanks! For anyone interested, the resume point is saved based strictly on the name of the file, so you could fool it by using a totally different video with the same name.

"cmcnulty" wrote:
On an even more different tangent, I've now saved the settings I used to encode as a Roku preset within Handbrake, however I can't see anyway to export them, or even where the presets are stored. ANyone know how to export handbrake presets?

Can't help you there. I prefer the command line version because it seems to be 4x faster than the GUI. I know that's probably because I don't have the GUI setup with the same options as I use on the command line, but I haven't felt like trying to figure out where they differ.

-JT

[myplanet]

I have windows 7 64-bit, python 64 bit, PIL-1.1.7.win32-py2.6.exe complains about not finding python. How can I fix this?