Roku Developer Program

[malort]

Is there any way to know if the screensaver is enabled? If true, is there any way to query for the time set?

[TheEndless]

Nope. Nothing documented, at least. No idea if there's an undocumented way of getting that information.

[destruk]

hmm...perhaps you could manually test if there is a screensaver enabled -- ie - have a server send ecp control presses to the roku at a 6, 11+5, and 31+10 minute interval and have the roku reply with how many button presses it received.
If the screensaver is active it will eat one of the button presses. You would need to have your roku channel send a button press notification from the user to the remote server to have correct timing on the server query back to roku. During video playback the screensaver won't turn on (unless it's paused IIRC).
You could prompt the user to tell you if the screensaver is enabled and what the interval is - through a dialog box or something.

[malort]

"TheEndless" wrote:
Nope. Nothing documented, at least. No idea if there's an undocumented way of getting that information.

Thanks for the quick response as always!

"destruk" wrote:
hmm...perhaps you could manually test if there is a screensaver enabled -- ie - have a server send ecp control presses to the roku at a 6, 11+5, and 31+10 minute interval and have the roku reply with how many button presses it received.
If the screensaver is active it will eat one of the button presses. You would need to have your roku channel send a button press notification from the user to the remote server to have correct timing on the server query back to roku. During video playback the screensaver won't turn on (unless it's paused IIRC).
You could prompt the user to tell you if the screensaver is enabled and what the interval is - through a dialog box or something.

I agree, one could try and find a way to determine it manually, but it would be far less than perfect. I can't find a way to query idle time, so basically we're also have the need to create our own roTimeSpan to determine idle time. The idea is to run some code when the screensaver kicks in, or at some arbitrary time if the screensaver is disabled. For now, I'd stay a bit more simplistic and just run the code ~31min (max screensaver time). Either it would have already ran with the screensaver (close enough) or manually after 31 minutes.

[RokuMarkn]

You could add a private screensaver to your channel, and then you'd know exactly when the screensaver started.

--Mark

[malort]

Thanks, however I was hoping to find out from the channel if a screensaver is enabled/disabled. I do already know when a screensaver is started, via the registry, but I'd like to know if the screensaver setting has been globally disabled.

"RokuMarkn" wrote:
You could add a private screensaver to your channel, and then you'd know exactly when the screensaver started.

--Mark

[RokuMarkn]

Ok, if you insist... It's not documented yet but 5.6 and later has ifAppManager::GetScreensaverTimeout(). It returns the number of minutes the screensaver is set to, or zero if it is disabled.

--Mark

[malort]

Thanks Mark!!

"RokuMarkn" wrote:
Ok, if you insist... It's not documented yet but 5.6 and later has ifAppManager::GetScreensaverTimeout(). It returns the number of minutes the screensaver is set to, or zero if it is disabled.

--Mark

[TheEndless]

"RokuMarkn" wrote:
Ok, if you insist... It's not documented yet but 5.6 and later has ifAppManager::GetScreensaverTimeout(). It returns the number of minutes the screensaver is set to, or zero if it is disabled.

--Mark

Nice one! I knew there had to be something undocumented.. 😉

"malort" wrote:
I can't find a way to query idle time

In theory, ifDeviceInfo.TimeSinceLastKeypress() should give you the user's idle time, but I've found that it resets randomly (probably not random) during video playback. If you're just using it to determine idle time for screensaver kick in, then that shouldn't be a problem, since the screensaver won't kick in during video playback anyway.

[malort]

Yea, I had used that at first, but there are some drawbacks as the last keypress isn't a perfect representation of being idle. Unless there is a way to query "true" idle time, I'd think it's best to just create an roTimeSpan and reset it during non-idle events. Along the same lines, I believe there were some hacks I ended up adding to the roImageCanvas. i.e. send an unused keyboard event locally to keep the Roku from being idle (custom slideshow), otherwise the screen saver would start. I am assuming the same would have to be done in an roScreen.

"TheEndless" wrote:

In theory, ifDeviceInfo.TimeSinceLastKeypress() should give you the user's idle time, but I've found that it resets randomly (probably not random) during video playback. If you're just using it to determine idle time for screensaver kick in, then that shouldn't be a problem, since the screensaver won't kick in during video playback anyway.

"malort" wrote:
I can't find a way to query idle time