Roku Developer Program

[renojim]

kretara, it doesn't sound like you're doing anything wrong. When you start the server it should display something like "submitting 'http://192.168.1.103:8001' to rendezvous server as xxxx". Do you get that and does the IP address match what you expect?

Any minute now I'll be releasing the beta of v2.0 that will allow you to bypass the automatic rendezvous and just enter the IP address of your server manually.

-JT

[renojim]

Ok, it's here! I'm still tweaking a few things, but I'd like to get some other eyes checking things out before I overwrite the main version since I made so many changes all at once.

What's new:

• Reworked interface - pretty much all of the "Retrieving" pop ups have been eliminated.


• User theme support - All the images and colors are retrieved from the server, so pretty much everything can be changed. I've created a sample theme based upon the high contrast theme created by witmar. My thanks and apologies to him (for mucking with his work). You can find the zip file here. There's two subdirectories, one for SD and one for HD. Copy the files from the appropriate subdirectory to the client/images directory. Before overwriting the files that are in that directory already, you may want to save them in case you want to go back to that theme.


• New posters - Instead of the multiple "Play All" posters that were used, "Play New" and "Loop All" posters have been added. With apologies to umbighouse (the creator of the original theme), I've created new posters for the original theme (they aren't an exact match to the original font, but they're not bad). You can get "Play New" here and "Loop All" here.


• Manual configuration - if there's a problem with the rendezvous server, the option to manually enter the IP address of the server is presented.


• Video resume points moved to server - Previously, the resume points for videos were stored on the box. With the move to the server, if you have more than one box you can start the video on one box and then resume it on another.


• Photo shuffle and play all - similar to music, you can now play or shuffle all your photos starting from any folder (including all subfolders).


• Shuffle for videos - unlike music and photos, the shuffle, loop, and play all features will not go into subfolders.


• Improved initial shuffling for music - the speed of the initial shuffling is greatly improved as well as the "randomness" of the first song that is played.


• Numerous fixes/enhancements - for one thing, hopefully the annoying occasional jumping to a new poster has been eliminated

I think that's about it, or at least that's the main points. A few of the changes required updates to the server. You'll want to download mymedia.py and common.py and overwrite the files in the server directory. The beta channel will work with the old server, but not all features will work (like themes and resume). You might want to make sure you have the latest version of the server, which you can get here, before you apply the updates.

If you've never tried My Media and would like to give this a try, follow the steps in the first page of this thread and then return here and get the beta channel and updated files.

The channel code for the v2.0 beta is mymediabeta. Let me know what you think and if anyone is interested in creating their own theme let me know and I'll post more detailed instructions on what it takes.

Once I'm sure everything is working properly I'll update the main channel and make sure everything makes it on to github.

Enjoy!
-JT

[renojim]

If anyone happened to download common.py last night, download it again. I some how put up the wrong version.

-JT

[fizgig]

Seems stable and much faster to me, nice work and thanks.

I am getting a weird mix of themes, the yellow tiles on MyVideos (on the actual video names) and the folders are the yellow icons, is there a cache I need to clear somehow?

Any way to change the thumbnail for each video? Any way to make the tiles have a transparent background and set the color of those as well?

[renojim]

"fizgig" wrote:
I am getting a weird mix of themes, the yellow tiles on MyVideos (on the actual video names) and the folders are the yellow icons, is there a cache I need to clear somehow?

I'm not sure what you mean. Could you take a picture of your screen and post it somewhere (or send it to me)? Have you made any changes to the images in client/images, or are you just using the original images? You should be able to change any image and at the most just have to restart the channel to get them to take effect.

"fizgig" wrote:
Any way to change the thumbnail for each video?

The method that's used to pick the thumbnail, or poster, that's used for any video or song is to first look for a JPEG in the same folder with the same name as the video or song. For example, if your video is "This is my video.m4v" the JPEG used would be "This is my video.jpg". If there is no corresponding JPEG but there's some other JPEG, or JPEGs, in the folder the first JPEG found will be used. That's why I generally name a JPEG "0.jpg" to make sure it's the one that's found. The same method applies to songs, although there is a slight difference since MP3s can have embedded images. The embedded image will be used first, followed by a JPEG with the same name as the MP3, followed by the first JPEG found.

"fizgig" wrote:
Any way to make the tiles have a transparent background and set the color of those as well?

I assume you are referring to the poster (Roku's terminology) when you say "tile". For example, the folder poster that looks like a drawing of a folder. If so, the posters have to be images of some sort. We've stuck to JPEGs, but PNGs and GIFs are also supported. The posters used are in the client/images directory and are the ones with "square" in their names. To use something other than a JPEG, you'd create an image and then rename it to match the name used in the client/images directory. So you could create a PNG to replace the folder poster and then just copy it to client/images/folder_square.jpg. It doesn't matter to the box that the ".jpg" is really a PNG.

I guess while I'm talking about replacing the posters I should go ahead and give some more information. Keep in mind that posters are fairly small. When your box is in HD mode a poster is rendered as 300x300 and when in SD mode it's 223x200. There's no sense in making a poster any bigger than that since it will just get reduced to the appropriate size and reducing it takes time on either the server (if PIL is installed) or on the box. If you only use HD, make all your "xxx_square.jpg" posters 300x300. If you only use SD, create a square image (300x300 or 200x200) and then shrink/stretch it to 223x200 so the aspect ratio will look correct when it's displayed. There's another way to get correct aspect ratio by using non-square pixels, but I've found this method to be easier since I don't have Photoshop. If you have multiple boxes connected to both HD and SD TVs, use 300x300 posters.

-JT

[fizgig]

I rebooted the Roku earlier and the images updated, I was getting half yellow and half black posters.

Now I am getting Invalid Response from the Rendezvous server on both the beta channel and regular channel, I backed up my server before I tried your changes, and running that does the same thing, stalls at Retreiving... on load and then errors out or just sticks at retreiving. Is there some central server somewhere this thing phones home to? My backup copy and original app should work fine.


//edit:

Rebooted router, now it works.

[fizgig]

I started a theme, it needs some work as I didn't realize things had/didn't have borders or the background colors didn't change or something is a category and something else is a file.

if you want to take a peak:
http://montyjasper.com/dump/images.zip

I used icons from here: http://ipapun.deviantart.com/gallery/#/d29wap8, full credit goes to ipapun for them, and I used Aller font http://www.fontsquirrel.com/fonts/Aller

[renojim]

"fizgig" wrote:
I rebooted the Roku earlier and the images updated, I was getting half yellow and half black posters.

That's strange. The box caches images, but I went to great pains to try to make sure the images are always refreshed from the server when the channel starts. If you change the images while the channel is running, the box will used cached images so you won't see your changes until you restart the channel.

"fizgig" wrote:
Now I am getting Invalid Response from the Rendezvous server on both the beta channel and regular channel, I backed up my server before I tried your changes, and running that does the same thing, stalls at Retreiving... on load and then errors out or just sticks at retreiving. Is there some central server somewhere this thing phones home to? My backup copy and original app should work fine.

It phones home to http://rokumm.appspot.com to retrieve the registration info. You can try it from a browser to see the mechanism in action. Go to http://rokumm.appspot.com/state?code=qskj to see what the response is for my server. Replace 'qskj' with your registration ID to see if it's working right for you. If you know your server's IP address is never going to change or you don't mind reconfiguring the channel when it does, you can go through the manual configuration (just choose "Unregister Device" from the settings, restart the channel and cancel the registration and you'll be able to enter your server's IP). If you cancel the registration and configure the server's IP yourself it won't try to retrieve the information from rokumm.appspot.com.

-JT

[renojim]

"fizgig" wrote:
I started a theme, it needs some work as I didn't realize things had/didn't have borders or the background colors didn't change or something is a category and something else is a file.

I like it. Kind of the minimalist approach.

There's a problem with your slices. The recommended maximum height is 124 pixels for HD and 83 pixels for SD. The enforced maximums are 138 for HD and 92 for SD. Another thing about the slices - Roku's idea is that you'd have a logo displayed in the upper left corner over a "slice" that fills the entire overhang area (as it's called). Your slice image could be a full image that fills the entire overhang area, or an image that gets repeated over and over again. A full image's dimensions would be 720x92 (max) for SD or 1280x138 (max) for HD.

Shrink your logos and slices a little and it will be fine.

-JT

[renojim]

One thing I should have mentioned about using your own images - there's lots of images in the client/images that never get used in the channel, so there's no need to create them. You can see the necessary images by looking at the example theme I posted. In general, it's all the "square" images, the "Logo" images, and the "Slice" images. If you want to change the colors used, you'll need a colors.xml file

Here's the complete list:
folder_square.jpg
livestream_square.jpg
loopall_square.jpg
media_square.jpg
music_square.jpg
nowplaying_square.jpg
photos_square.jpg
playall_square.jpg
playnew_square.jpg
settings_square.jpg
shuffleall_square.jpg
streams_square.jpg
videos_square.jpg
media_Logo_Overhang_HD.png
media_Logo_Overhang_SD43.png
music_Logo_Overhang_HD.png
music_Logo_Overhang_SD43.png
photo_Logo_Overhang_HD.png
photo_Logo_Overhang_SD43.png
settings_Logo_Overhang_HD.png
settings_Logo_Overhang_SD43.png
streams_Logo_Overhang_HD.png
streams_Logo_Overhang_SD43.png
video_Logo_Overhang_HD.png
video_Logo_Overhang_SD43.png
Overhang_BackgroundSlice_HD.png
Overhang_BackgroundSlice_SD43.png
colors.xml - optional

As I mentioned before, you can use JPEGs, PNGs, or GIFs for any image, but the file name has to match the above list for the channel to be able to find it. You don't have to have a colors.xml file and you don't need _SD43 images if you're only ever planning on using this on an HD TV. Likewise you don't need the _HD images if you're only planning on using this on an SD TV. If you want to create a theme for everyone, you'll want to create both sets of images (and test them out by putting your box in both SD and HD modes - it doesn't matter if your TV is SD and your box is in HD mode and vice versa).

The colors shown in my example theme are the only ones that are changed from their defaults. There's lots of other colors (mostly text colors) that could be changed. You'll want to download the developer's documentation if you're interested.

-JT