Roku Developer Program

[MazeWizzard]

Hi all. I've a small app that I'd like to begin my internal QA with, but thought I'd ask how the experienced developers that have released applications set up their QA environment. Yes, I've read the design guidelines, but this question is about actually performing the QA on physical equipment. I did try searching......... Any links in this forum to topics related to this? I've tried searching for "testing" and "testing environment", but haven't really found much. Since I'm new to the forum, it's rather hard to digest that much history.

I assume that open Betas help in this regard (the plethora of target display equipment). But before that (Alpha)...

Do you have ?4? sets to output to with different video input/display capabilities? Do you "cheat" and use HD sets in different modes? Is there a suggested setup for this? What feedback has the user community given? Any weird equipment out there that forced a design change or update? Any significant differences in Roku boxes (other than the new remote) that cause you to use multiple boxes for testing?

I realize that I may be over-complicating this a bit, but it's easy to ask 1st and not get burned later. If you feel this is part of your "in-house expertise" and don't want to comment, I'd understand. However, if you are willing to share any experiences or environment configs, I'd appreciate it.

Just curious.

[RokuKevin]

MazeWizzard,

I think the most overlooked test environment out there is an SD set. A fair number of the Roku players out there are running in SD mode, and it is wise to test that your channel works in both HD and SD environments.

--Kevin

[MazeWizzard]

Thanks. I can scrounge one of those up.

Can I expect similar performance out of old Rokus (what's the plural on that? 🙂 ) as my XD? So it should bench the same... no real need to test on multiple boxes?

[jbrave]

I have an old SD set I use for my main dev box and then test on an HD monitor. Occasionally, I'll switch the SD roku to HD, it outputs a squashed verion via the composite, so you could actually get away with testing everything on an SDTV if you had to.

Both my Roku's are the first series Roku HD, so I can't say anything about performance of the newer series, but i haven't gotten any complaints. Some things are different on HD: drawing a full screen image canvas is a bit slower in HD mode, as one might expect given the additional cpu needed to draw to a larger area. The overhang image may need to be adjusted to not interfere with the overhang breadcrumb text. The advertising banner on SD actually touches the bottom of the posterscreen text and doesn't look very good on SD, not much you can do about that but adjust the color on the edges to avoid visual conflict.

- Joel