Roku Developer Program

[ioan]

We need some kind of soft Roku simulator, a VM or something to be able to test our channels when we don't have a TV available... I do most of my pet projects work at the office, and I don't have a TV here.
To really get any geek work done you need a stupid day job.

[GandK-Geoff]

"ioan" wrote:
We need some kind of soft Roku simulator, a VM or something to be able to test our channels when we don't have a TV available... I do most of my pet projects work at the office, and I don't have a TV here.
To really get any geek work done you need a stupid day job.

While I would *love* to have a simulator, for this particular case (not having a TV in my home office) I found it useful to just get a 1920x1080 monitor that had an HDMI input for the Roku as well as DVI for my PC. Then just switching inputs gets you most of the way there, especially if you have a secondary monitor for the PC you can use for watching the Roku debug console.

Now what I *really* want is the ability to get a digital screenshot or video (not sampled off the analog outs, the real deal) of my own channels in action. I wouldn't even mind if it only worked when the active channel had been sideloaded.

[ioan]

"GandK-Geoff" wrote:
While I would *love* to have a simulator, for this particular case (not having a TV in my home office) I found it useful to just get a 1920x1080 monitor that had an HDMI input for the Roku as well as DVI for my PC.

I meant to say I don't have a TV or a Roku at the office, so a soft simulator would be great 🙂

[TheEndless]

"GandK-Geoff" wrote:
While I would *love* to have a simulator, for this particular case (not having a TV in my home office) I found it useful to just get a 1920x1080 monitor that had an HDMI input for the Roku as well as DVI for my PC. Then just switching inputs gets you most of the way there, especially if you have a secondary monitor for the PC you can use for watching the Roku debug console.

Now what I *really* want is the ability to get a digital screenshot or video (not sampled off the analog outs, the real deal) of my own channels in action. I wouldn't even mind if it only worked when the active channel had been sideloaded.

This is how I've got mine setup, too. I've also got the component out routed through a SlingBox, so I can view the output on my main screen as well, which also allows me to take screenshots.

[krazy]

get a video tv capture card, then you can connect roku to this card (desktop pci , laptop usb) then you can watch video screen on your pc monitor.

[evilmax17]

"ioan" wrote:
We need some kind of soft Roku simulator, a VM or something to be able to test our channels when we don't have a TV available... I do most of my pet projects work at the office, and I don't have a TV here. To really get any geek work done you need a stupid day job.

"GandK-Geoff" wrote:
Now what I *really* want is the ability to get a digital screenshot or video (not sampled off the analog outs, the real deal) of my own channels in action. I wouldn't even mind if it only worked when the active channel had been sideloaded.

Throwing my support in for both points.

A Roku emulator would let me develop/test on my laptop when I'm not at home, and the ability to take screenshots would save me from dropping a few hundred bucks on a video capture card.

Both features would be greatly used and appreciated.

[retrotom]

I value the idea of a VM for those times when you just can't get in front of TV or your Roku isn't handy. But I think that community-based solution might be a better idea. Personally, I'd rather see Kevin and co. working towards more feature improvements than on an emulator. Because the Roku is your actual development kit/device and all packages, etc. still need to be sideloaded -- it's more of a convenience than an actual aid to development. You could work in the VM...but you'd still need to own/use an actual roku in order to create packages. Your due diligence and debugging should happen on real life hardware. I think some of the components to create an emulator are available already. There's enough information about the language, object creation and scoping, and I/O access in order create an emulator. Creating a brightscript analyzer/lexer is possible (there's already a plugin for eclipse that probably does most of what you need), and the rest would be emulating the out of the box components.

I think that being able to get a screenshot from the app would be nice. If, at the SDK level, you could get read-only access to the current frame buffer, then we could write our own "uploaded screenshot to server" feature or something.

[TheEndless]

"retrotom" wrote:
I think that being able to get a screenshot from the app would be nice. If, at the SDK level, you could get read-only access to the current frame buffer, then we could write our own "uploaded screenshot to server" feature or something.

Not to mention being able to capture alpha blended regions of a canvas for re-display post blend, so you wouldn't have to take the blending performance hit every time you redraw the screen... (reading back over that sentence, I'm not sure if it makes sense, but at least I know what I'm trying to say :P)

[GandK-Geoff]

"TheEndless" wrote:
Not to mention being able to capture alpha blended regions of a canvas for re-display post blend, so you wouldn't have to take the blending performance hit every time you redraw the screen... (reading back over that sentence, I'm not sure if it makes sense, but at least I know what I'm trying to say :P)

It makes perfect sense to me, since I want that myself. 🙂

[jbrave]

I wonder if one could just read the contents of the rom's built into the roku and create a vm that way, but you would have to have a cpu emulator as well.