Roku Developer Program

[sharpedge]

I finally did the set-up for My Media on my PC, and I have to say it was easier than I expected, and the results are awesome - I thought browsing my music collection might be slow, but it's very fast, all I need to do now is buy a NAS to put everything on. I did have an issue because I initially had file paths to Musics, Movies and Pictures that contained spaces, but once I fixed that it works great. I do have a few of questions though:

- Sizing of album and movie art, what's the optimal size for both? The same album artwork displays perfectly through the MP3Tunes channel, but with My Media it looks a little grainy and distorted.

- I used handbrake to create all the movie files, and nearly all of them turned out great. The one big exception is The Incredibles, which looks fine when I play it on the PC but is very squished (lots of black space either side) when I play on the Roku, any ideas?

- Can you listen to music and have a photo slideshow at the same time? How does that work?

Thanks so much to everyone that's contributed to My Media, after seeing it in action my wife finally sees the need for us to get a NAS 🙂

[huzefa_mehta]

Those instructions are obsolete at this point. Add the channel with this link, enter and exit the Channel Store to get the channel added after following the link, and then follow the instructions displayed when you start the channel. You need Python v2.6 if you want to use the optional PIL package.

What did you mean by "You need Python v2.6 if you want to use the optional PIL package" What does the optional PIL package give me?

[huzefa_mehta]

I managed to get the setup and see the folders, but dont see my photo files yet on the screen.

There is a cmd window open which is still running

198.168.1.79.<portnum> HTTP 1.1 GET

something like that

[renojim]

"sharpedge" wrote:
- Sizing of album and movie art, what's the optimal size for both? The same album artwork displays perfectly through the MP3Tunes channel, but with My Media it looks a little grainy and distorted.

The art is getting resized (via the PIL package) to increase the speed of photo viewing mostly, but it also affects album and movie art. If you don't want anything resized you could uninstall the PIL package. I'll take a look and make sure things are getting sized appropriately.

"sharpedge" wrote:
- I used handbrake to create all the movie files, and nearly all of them turned out great. The one big exception is The Incredibles, which looks fine when I play it on the PC but is very squished (lots of black space either side) when I play on the Roku, any ideas?

Hmm... this was a problem a while back, but should have been fixed by a firmware update. Which version of the Roku firmware do you have (on the "Player Info" settings page)? Alternatively, try encoding with the x264 codec. It's much slower than the ffmpeg encoder, but you may get better results. I use HandBrake as well and I'd say about 1 out of 10 videos will have a problem of some sort. I've never been able to figure out exactly what the problem is.

"sharpedge" wrote:
- Can you listen to music and have a photo slideshow at the same time? How does that work?

Yes. Start the music then navigate to your Photos. Music will keep playing until you start a video. You can return to the current song display by going to "Now Playing".

"sharpedge" wrote:
Thanks so much to everyone that's contributed to My Media, after seeing it in action my wife finally sees the need for us to get a NAS 🙂

You're welcome! I don't know a lot about NASs, but if you get one that is capable of running Python (I use a Seagate Dockstar), you'll be able to run the server on the NAS and won't need a PC powered on anymore.

-JT

[renojim]

"huzefa_mehta" wrote:
What did you mean by "You need Python v2.6 if you want to use the optional PIL package" What does the optional PIL package give me?

The PIL package is used to resize photos and artwork to speed up the browsing. It's optional, but without it browsing photos can be painfully slow.

"huzefa_mehta" wrote:
I managed to get the setup and see the folders, but dont see my photo files yet on the screen.

Did you go into the "My Photos" folder?

-JT

[huzefa_mehta]

Yes, I did go into My Photos and see the folder. I can see the image file name, but when I click on it, it takes forever and nothing shows up on the screen. I have lots of photos. Would this be an issue?

[renojim]

Yes, lots of photos in one folder cause it to be painfully slow if you don't have the PIL package installed. You may want to install Python v2.6 and the PIL package.

-JT

[sharpedge]

"renojim" wrote:
Hmm... this was a problem a while back, but should have been fixed by a firmware update. Which version of the Roku firmware do you have (on the "Player Info" settings page)? Alternatively, try encoding with the x264 codec. It's much slower than the ffmpeg encoder, but you may get better results. I use HandBrake as well and I'd say about 1 out of 10 videos will have a problem of some sort. I've never been able to figure out exactly what the problem is.

Thanks, I encoded using dvdfab this morning (ipad settings), and it looks great now.

Regarding the artwork, looking at it again, the album covers look good, but maybe that's because they're square and easier to resize? Perhaps there's an optimal size for DVD artwork for it to look good, I'll try and play around with it a little.

[jbandlow]

Hi all, I'm having some troubles getting my server set up, and I'm hoping someone here can help.

I have a desktop running Ubuntu 10.10 where I've installed the server. The IP for this machine is 192.168.1.46, and I've changed the server settings (both in the server configuration and the Roku settings) to reflect that. If I point my laptop browser at 192.168.1.46:8001, I have no problem accessing and playing my music. From my Roku, though, when I click on 'My Music', there is a delay and then the message: "Server Problem. Communications with the server has been lost. Ok/Abort" The server is still running after this happens--without restarting it, I can still access it from my laptop.

Any hints as to what I can use this from my Roku? Thanks!

[renojim]

That's strange. I suspect there's strange song info that's causing a problem. Can you try creating a new music folder and just put one MP3 in that folder to see if that works? Don't forget to change your configuration to point to the new folder. You can just edit config.ini directly if you like.

-JT