Roku Developer Program

[crimsonmane]

I have two issues:

1) Multiple Video File Locations
--- I have one internal hdd holding most media and the OS (Linux), and one internal hdd holding our Disney & Dreamworks movies; it's nearly 100% full. How do I add multiple Video folder locations?

2) "Empty" Folders
--- Most video folders are showing up, but when going into those folders most are reporting "no media files found." The only one I could play was the Charlie Brown folder. Is file format preventing items from appearing? How to proceed?

EDIT:

Using Roku2XS
Entire library has "chmod -R 755" permissions.

And a great big THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU for creating this app. We're huge fans of the open source movement, and your product has autoplay which Plex lacks.

[renojim]

"crimsonmane" wrote:
1) Multiple Video File Locations
--- I have one internal hdd holding most media and the OS (Linux), and one internal hdd holding our Disney & Dreamworks movies; it's nearly 100% full. How do I add multiple Video folder locations?

I handle this by using symbolic links. For example, if your Video folder is set to /home/me/videos, add a symbolic link under that folder that links to the other drive/folder. If you're not familiar with symbolic links, just let me know and I'll try to help.

"crimsonmane" wrote:
2) "Empty" Folders
--- Most video folders are showing up, but when going into those folders most are reporting "no media files found." The only one I could play was the Charlie Brown folder. Is file format preventing items from appearing? How to proceed?

Keep in mind that the Roku only supports MPEG4 files. If there are no files with a .mp4 or .m4v extension you'll get the "no media files found" message. For completeness, .mov files will show up as well, but I don't think they're supported by the box anymore.

-JT

[crimsonmane]

Thanks for your reply! Symlinks worked out fine, very pleased. As for Roku file format... 99.9% of my media files are .avi and they work fine in Plex/Roku, and this must be because of transcoding. But the important thing you are saying is that if it isn't .mp4 (.m4v) then on MyMedia it simply won't appear in the mymedia list in the first place. This seems to be true with Roksbox as well (we're running plex roksbox and mymedia, looking for the one that works the best for us and our goals).

I tried to code an .m4v from The Lorax but messed something up in the settings - the quality was absolute garbage. I'll try again in the coming days.

I also tried to convert one file that plays video but not audio from .avi to .mkv and it looks like it's there in mymedia (and even roksbox) but trying to play it causes roku to reboot. It's possible that each coding attempt overwrote the file and the server apps were confused? (it finally works in plex after recoding... i'll test it again in roksbox and mymedia later)

Rambling aside, thanks again for your help 🙂 If I may ask one more followup question, can you (or someone) please hand me the settings I should be using with handbrake? This isn't a college exam so it isn't cheating... Copy/Paste the appropriate section of your presets file would work also 🙂 I do the following:
AVI to M4V
ISO to M4V
DVD to M4V
and with your presets I should be able to convert my entire library and rip the remaining dvd's correctly. My limited understanding of this stuff is... it doesn't matter what the source is as long as the destination has the right settings. Those charts... like http://roksbox.wikispaces.com/file/view ... ormats.jpg do not help me, they confuse me more. Please, please, on my knees, just give me the settings...

[renojim]

There's lots of good information about video encoding in the Video Encoding for the USB Channel thread or you can just go here for a good guide. Personally, I use the command line version of Handbrake and add pretty much nothing to the options:

HandbrakeCLI -i infile.avi -o outfile.m4v -r 29.97 -O

The -r 29.97 sets the framerate to 29.97 fps (which I've found works best on the Roku no matter what the framerate of the source is) and the the -O optimizes the file for streaming (puts the meta-info at the beginning of the file). That handles about 99% of my needs, but my standards are pretty low for video/audio quality.

I've never tried to get Handbrake to work on an ISO, so I don't know if it's possible or not. I'd probably just mount the ISO using MagicISO and use HandbrakeCLI as I would for a DVD:

HandbrakeCLI -i x:\VIDEO_TS -o movie.m4v -r 29.97 -O

You sometimes have to tell Handbrake which title to encode (with -t), but it usually figures it out on its own.

Of course, this is all for Windows, so a Linux solution might be a little different.

Hope this helps!
-JT

[crimsonmane]

That helps tremendously, thank you! The CLI should be the same for me. The last part of our plight is batch converting. Handbrake's queue feature isn't a good solution. I know some Linux CLI gurus who I'll ask for help on batching. Some time in the next week is the next opportunity to try your CLI.

It's really easy to use an ISO as source with handbrake, simply designate it as source 🙂 Oh, suddenly it comes to mind that maybe that's the reason it turned out with garbage quality...?

But hey, we don't have to buy the White album again every time a new format becomes the standard - we only have to convert the White album we already own!

[xwin]

I found that Roku can play MPEG-4 part 2 (Divx) which is what most of the avi files contain. Transcoding in this case becomes very simple and fast as only audio should be transcoded. I posted about this on my blog here: http://thingsiused.blogspot.com/
Personally for transcoding I use ffmpeg and have a script for batch processing which I can share if anyone wants it. It is a bash script and run on windows using cygwin. I also found that Roku reboots when seeking within mkv files from the network but plays them well from the local storage. Very strange.
ffmpeg uses the same x264 engine as Handbrake and possibly the same faac for audio. The quality should be identical and ffmpeg is updated much more often. Not that anything is wrong with Handbrake.
By the way, if you are interested in scraping some web videos, I found that RTMPDumpHelper works really well for most of the videos that other scrapers miss. I was able to download some America's Test Kitchen episodes which I could not before.

[crimsonmane]

Update to our plight:

Use HandBrakeCLI to batch convert media files in a folder on Linux Command Line and force frame rate 29.97 and optimize for streaming:

for file in `ls /path/to/source/files/`; do $(HandBrakeCLI -i /path/to/source/files/${file} -o /path/to/destination/"${file}.mp4" -r 29.97 -O); done

and the ONLY parts you change is "/path/to/source/files/" and "/path/to/destination/". DO NOT change {file}. This might make your destination file something like "lorax.avi.mp4" but w/e I haven't gotten that far yet.

If the original is an ISO, then you'll need to figure out which title contains the chapters by specifying Title Zero (default is to convert title 1, which is probably not the right one) (note - some people think you have to mount the ISO first, but that doesnt convert as fast - so dont bother):

HandBrakeCLI -i /path/to/file.iso -t 0

then take a look at the output and figure out which title has all the chapters. for me it was title 2. then:

HandBrakeCLI -i /path/to/file.iso -t 2 -o /path/to/filename.m4v -r 29.97 -O

[xwin]

This is link to the script that I use to transcode for roku. The scripts supports various transcoding modes and passing list of files or wildcards on command line. It is a bash script so it can run ether in cygwin (as I use it) or on unix.
You would need to edit it to specify location of your ffmpeg binary. You can also adjust command line parameters to your liking. Parameters in the script work well on my AMD x6 machine. They produce reasonable output in a reasonable time. Any feedback is welcome.

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/58276789/transcode.sh

[rickabillie]

Has anybody tried serving the media from a tonidoplug (2)?
Hints or a step by step?
Thanks,
/R

[renojim]

I'm not familiar with a Tonidoplug, but I use a Dockstar (Pogoplug clone). Basically, if you can install Python v2.6 it should work. I believe you should already have some version of Python on there already, but v2.6 is the only version that's really supported by MyMedia.

Once you've got the Python part set up, just copy everything from the server directory from the git repository anywhere you like. Set the paths in config.ini and start the server with:

python mymedia.py

Post back and I'll try to help where I can.

-JT