Roku Developer Program

[Icesnake]

Another little project if anyone out there is more clever than I am so far (that should be easy);

Take a look at the text in http://www.youtube.com/rss/user/Discove ... videos.rss and see if there's a way to convert it to an .m3u8 file, perhaps using a script (which means it could be automated). If it can be done, then we just found a way to get streaming video from "official sources" on YouTube onto the Roku.

[midiwall]

"Icesnake" wrote:

"midiwall" wrote:
One thing to note is a tagline on their website. The Facebook promo copy does NOT include free upgrades or technical support.

My feeling is that upgrades and tech support are for people who can't get MyMedia working anyhow. Other than a speed increase (which we could get with new hardware, in theory), what would an upgrade give us?

Output formats, bug fixes, audio mux support, new features like not having to go through a ripper... 🙂 Look at it this way, there's gotta be some reason that they've been releasing updates. 🙂 I only mention it 'cause it's a potential limitation that's not made apparent on the Facebook page.

Also, you've talked about audio sync relating to filesize. The audio sync issue actually had little to do with filesize - though longer titles would be apt to show more of a sync issue. One thing that came out during the DVDFab problem discovery is that the IFO and VOBs of a DVD extract could have varying ideas about video framerates. it was found that DVDFab was trying to be too smart and actually following the changing framerates within the headers and indices. This lead to the re-write of the mobile media engine.

[Icesnake]

"midiwall" wrote:
Output formats, bug fixes, audio mux support, new features like not having to go through a ripper... 🙂 Look at it this way, there's gotta be some reason that they've been releasing updates. 🙂 I only mention it 'cause it's a potential limitation that's not made apparent on the Facebook page.

Agree, although having worked with software and hardware Marketing people, my cynical viewpoint is that updates are released so that people will buy the same thing they already have again, thus generating more revenue for the developer. Think Laserdisc -> DVD -> Blu-Ray for an extreme example.

"midiwall" wrote:
Also, you've talked about audio sync relating to filesize. The audio sync issue actually had little to do with filesize - though longer titles would be apt to show more of a sync issue. One thing that came out during the DVDFab problem discovery is that the IFO and VOBs of a DVD extract could have varying ideas about video framerates. it was found that DVDFab was trying to be too smart and actually following the changing framerates within the headers and indices. This lead to the re-write of the mobile media engine.

All I know about that is that when I first ran into the sync issue, poking around in this forum led me to solve it by file size limitation. Since a 2 GB 90-minute movie is the same length as the same 90-minute movie with a 4 GB file size, and the 2 GB file didn't have sync problems, I went there.

[midiwall]

"Icesnake" wrote:

"midiwall" wrote:
Output formats, bug fixes, audio mux support, new features like not having to go through a ripper... 🙂 Look at it this way, there's gotta be some reason that they've been releasing updates. 🙂 I only mention it 'cause it's a potential limitation that's not made apparent on the Facebook page.

Agree, although having worked with software and hardware Marketing people, my cynical viewpoint is that updates are released so that people will buy the same thing they already have again, thus generating more revenue for the developer. Think Laserdisc -> DVD -> Blu-Ray for an extreme example.

Agreed, and I'll toss in that that some (most even!) of these "all their websites look the same" products are doing just that. We'll have to wait and see how this product pans out. Taking a step back though, it's only $20 from the website, and I try to be pretty fair about supporting products I use.

I have 4 encodes running now, and I was happy to see that they're all runnning in parallel. Looks like they're running in real time, so about 2 hours front-to-back for four movies, plus about 20min each for the initial rip. That's quicker than the total time that DVDFab takes to rip & convert in a single pass. Plus, the batch mode is nice, though I have a couple of niggles about how the UI works. Maybe they'll fix it in a future upgrade? 😄

All I know about that is that when I first ran into the sync issue, poking around in this forum led me to solve it by file size limitation. Since a 2 GB 90-minute movie is the same length as the same 90-minute movie with a 4 GB file size, and the 2 GB file didn't have sync problems, I went there.

Gotcha'.

[dellsweig]

How would one configure MyMedia on my PC to

1) load the client on 2 Roku's (same subnet)
2) service requests from 2 Roku's

Thanks

Dan

[renojim]

"dellsweig" wrote:
How would one configure MyMedia on my PC to

1) load the client on 2 Roku's (same subnet)
2) service requests from 2 Roku's

Thanks

Dan

I just got my second Roku, so this is something I'll be looking into. If you just got a new box, keep in mind that you have to put the box in developer mode to load the client on it (Home 3x, Up 2x, Right, Left, Right, Left, Right). Loading the client should just be a matter of changing the IP address in the Python Springboard setup. At some point I'm going to make this a private channel so that this isn't necessary (actually, I've already done it, but it's my experimental version that probably won't work with the latest server on github).

I haven't tried it, but I would think the easiest way to service requests from 2 Roku's simultaneously would be to run two instances of the server on different ports. The resume data for videos is stored on the box itself, so if you start a video on one box, quit in the middle, and then want to resume on the other box, the resume point will not be reflected on the other box. I have a working version that saves the resume data on the server so that you can pick up where you left off, but I don't know when I'll get a chance to get back to this project and get out a new release.

Another thing I've experimented with that some people might be interested in is subtitles. The latest firmware supports SRT files. You have to find or create the files yourself and they have to be either on all the time or not (there's no way to toggle them during playback). I'll probably also add support for USB devices, but I'm not sure why you'd want to use one when you can stream from your server.

-JT

[mtgugg]

Hi all,

I'm running OSX 10.5.8, with Python (3.1.2)

When I click 'Install Client' in the tk window:

writing configuration
Exception in Tkinter callback
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/System/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.5/lib/python2.5/lib-tk/Tkinter.py", line 1403, in __call__
  File "/Users/brontyproductions/Desktop/netguy204-roku_media_server-25aaa89/server/springboard.py", line 176, in install_client
    build_client_zip(config, client_src, client_zip)
  File "/Users/brontyproductions/Desktop/netguy204-roku_media_server-25aaa89/server/springboard.py", line 78, in build_client_zip
    os.mkdir(zipsdir)
OSError: [Errno 13] Permission denied: '../zips'

Then I ran the Springboard_Debug.bat:

/Users/brontyproductions/Desktop/netguy204-roku_media_server-25aaa89/springboard_debug.bat 
/Users/brontyproductions/Desktop/netguy204-roku_media_server-25aaa89/springboard_debug.bat: line 1: rem: command not found
/Users/brontyproductions/Desktop/netguy204-roku_media_server-25aaa89/springboard_debug.bat: line 2: rem: command not found
/Users/brontyproductions/Desktop/netguy204-roku_media_server-25aaa89/springboard_debug.bat: line 4: cd: server: No such file or directory
/Users/brontyproductions/Desktop/netguy204-roku_media_server-25aaa89/springboard_debug.bat: line 5: c:python26python.exe: command not found

I'm sorry if this question was answered somewhere else. Does anyone have any idea what's going on here?

Thanks in advance,
Michael

[renojim]

It doesn't work with Python 3.x. Python 2.6 is what we started with and I think I checked that 2.7 works, but 3.x definitely does not. Sorry.

-JT

[Icesnake]

Python 2.7 did not work (for Windows) two weeks ago. I haven't tried since then because I wanted to run a surface scan on my new 6 TB server before using it to store much data. Has there been a new release of MyMedia that I missed since then?

[renojim]

No new release in a while. el.wubo has bowed out and it's his github account that we've been using. I thought I tried Python 2.7 and it worked except for not being able to find the PIL package for 2.7.

-JT