Roku Developer Program

[canaws]

The roku plays a limited range of file types and I don't think mts is one of them. There only way to get around that is to convert the files to mp4 or use one of the local media channels/servers that offer on-the-fly transcoding (if it will transcode mts files).

[renojim]

jakobkraft, you might want to use the "Add to playlist" feature to add a bunch of songs to a playlist, unless you enjoy playing one song and then going back and selecting another song. 😄 The best way to use that feature is to select your first song, pause the audio, add it to the playlist, and then start browsing through your collection selecting songs and adding them to the playlist. When you have enough selected, choose "Start playlist" (and unpause the audio). m3u playlist files are also supported.

As canaws said, the Roku only supports a very limited set of video formats. HandBrake is free and will convert pretty much anything into MP4 format, which is supported.

Welcome to MyMedia!
-JT

[jakobkraft]

Thanks for the welcome!
I've tried pretty much every Roku channel that offers playback of local media, and this was the only one I could get working, so I'm very grateful! I just hope it stays in development.

I have Xilisoft Video converter, so I can convert what videos I'd like to access to MP4, when I have the time. Is this the same thing as what Handbrake does? I've read people refer to 'on the fly' transcoding' -- does that mean that it converts the file AS IT PLAYS? Because if so, then that would save me the hassle of converting first...

Also -- I noticed photo quality is not so good. I have some pics that were taken with HD camera and look great on my pc but in MyMedia they look somehow compressed. Is this normal? No biggie, just thought I'd ask. Thanks again!

[renojim]

It sounds like the Xilisoft Video converter does the same thing as HandBrake. On-the-fly transcoding refers to converting the video "on demand" and is something that this channel doesn't do. I'm not a big fan of it for a few reasons, so I don't have much interest in it. It sounds good on the surface, but I prefer to just convert something once and be done with it. I might feel differently if I had tons of videos, but I don't.

The photo thing isn't your imagination. Now that you're sucked in, you might want to try the 2.0 beta version. It fixes that problem (I think). If you don't want to try it, you can also edit common.py in the server directory and change

FULL_DIM = FULL_SD_DIM

to

FULL_DIM = FULL_HD_DIM

I think that fixes the problem as well. Make sure you stop and restart the server after making the change.

-JT

[jakobkraft]

"renojim" wrote:
The photo thing isn't your imagination. Now that you're sucked in, you might want to try the 2.0 beta version. It fixes that problem (I think). If you don't want to try it, you can also edit common.py in the server directory and change

FULL_DIM = FULL_SD_DIM

to

FULL_DIM = FULL_HD_DIM

I think that fixes the problem as well. Make sure you stop and restart the server after making the change.

-JT

That made a HUGE difference -- thank you!! This makes it much more viable as a photo viewer, appreciate it!
The only thing I'm still noticing is jagged edges along anything at an angle within the photo. It's the sort of thing that anti-aliasing fixes in games, smoothing out surfaces. Is there a setting in the common.py that might fix that as well? If not, that's cool, it's totally acceptable as is.
Thanks again!

[renojim]

I assume you installed the Python Imaging Library (PIL) package (you must have or changing that line wouldn't have made any difference). It may be that it doesn't do a great job scaling images and that the box could do a better job on its own. One thing to try would be to try it without PIL. You don't say what OS your server is running, but on Windows you can easily try it without PIL by renaming the PIL directory in C:\Python26\Lib\site-packages to something else (like xPIL) and restarting the server. That will take PIL's scaling out of the equation, but it will make navigation painfully slow.

I'd be interested to hear if it makes a noticeable difference. If it does make a difference, I could change it so that PIL is used to scale the thumbnails, but the box is used to scale the fullscreen images.

-JT

[jakobkraft]

"renojim" wrote:
I assume you installed the Python Imaging Library (PIL) package (you must have or changing that line wouldn't have made any difference). It may be that it doesn't do a great job scaling images and that the box could do a better job on its own. One thing to try would be to try it without PIL. You don't say what OS your server is running, but on Windows you can easily try it without PIL by renaming the PIL directory in C:\Python26\Lib\site-packages to something else (like xPIL) and restarting the server. That will take PIL's scaling out of the equation, but it will make navigation painfully slow.

I'd be interested to hear if it makes a noticeable difference. If it does make a difference, I could change it so that PIL is used to scale the thumbnails, but the box is used to scale the fullscreen images.

-JT

Thanks for the suggestion - I'm running Win 7 so I tried renaming the PIL folder -- it didn't seem to make a noticeable difference, but like I said, it's still way better than it was...

[Novo]

On step 2 when i run the command in a terminal window I get this error:using frameworks at /System/Library/Frameworks
unable to execute gcc-4.2: No such file or directory
error: Setup script exited with error: command 'gcc-4.2' failed with exit status 1

I continue on to the next steps but when I go to configure my server it doesn't load the page. Any ideas? Thanks!

[renojim]

I'm not sure which step 2 you're referring to. On what OS are you installing? I'm guessing this is a Mac, so I'm probably not going to be a lot of help. The error implies that you have to install gcc-4.2 in order to install Python.

-JT

[fubaya]

I saw this asked earlier but didn't see an answer. Is there any way to force a directory to use a certain image for it's art? My video directory has a Movies directory. Inside are a lot of mp4s, all with their own jpgs. But even with an image inside named Movies.jpg, 0.jpg and AAA.jpg, it just shows a random image from one of the movies inside. It changes sometimes when I add movies. Right now the poster for A League Of Their Own is shown to represent the Movie folder and it doesn't exactly reflect my taste in movies 🙂