Join our online forum to talk to Roku developers and fellow channel creators. Ask questions, share tips with the community, and find helpful resources.
As a developer I was happy to dive into Roku development as soon as I received my box. I started off with the "videoplayer" code like most do. I started by just loading up 1 movie etc...After I got this successfully working I decided to create a legit xml feed for a channel I am working on. I briefly read over the design docs...but missed something important that literally took me hours of the box crashing / rebooting to figure out.
This is about the descriptions. The descriptions I had were about 300-500 characters in length. I found out after some reading that the maximum is about 250 characters. However -- everything seemed to be working fine with just some random crashes when I had about 4 movies up. Once I bumped this to about 20 movies in the XML the device would crash everytime I would just "select" a movie to view it's information.
After reducing the characters to <250 the problem has completely gone away -- along with the crashing and rebooting.
I thought this was interesting to bring up because I read around and apparently a developer is not supposed to be able to crash the device...well...I haven't even modified any code and I got it to crash with just long descriptions 🙂
Thanks Kevin. Trust me, any info I need to give to prevent it from crashing always willing to do. For those of you who don't know -- when you are constantly encountering a crash it sucks because the trial-and-error involves "trial" -> crash *wait 5min for it to boot* ->trial
Thanks! That may explain some of the erratic operation I have seen. It hasn't been as consistent as you report, but I am not currently limiting the length of the description text, I was letting the Roku handle truncation of it.
