Roku Developer Program

[dynamitemedia]

i know this may be crazy question and i have read around on what others have posted.

but my question is can you actually have sound in your screensaver?

i am working on a little slideshow project from scratch and wanted to know if its possible to when going to screensaver can it play a little tune or a short .mp3 or even a video file.

new to this as i always worked from the video player example... and seems trying to look at flicker or anything else for the examples, you can only take so much from it because well not sure what you can take out without killing something else so i figured i would start from scratch

[TheEndless]

From the component reference:

Sub RunScreenSaver(Void)

• Entered when the Roku has hit the configured idle-time. The screensaver to launch is selected by the user on the Screensaver settings page.


• The Roku box may not start the custom screensaver and will use a default screensaver instead if there is insufficient memory to start a screensaver slideshow


• roVideoPlayer and roAudioPlayer are not allowed to be run in a screensaver


• If you have any dialogs with ShowBusyAnimation() enabled, you’ll want to make sure you close and kill the reference before painting a new screen on top of them. Otherwise, your app may lose focus when returning from the screensaver.

[dynamitemedia]

thanks, and why is that?

NOTE: i do want to say i did read that saw that before, but i thought for some reason i saw something different with another channel. butthat was because the audio player was already playing.

so i am guessing the issue is it cant have open more than one audio device basically

[TheEndless]

Roku would need to answer that, but I can think of a few possible reasons...

• As you mentioned, access to the players may be limited to a single instance.


• The screensaver runs in a separate thread, while any number of applications could be running in the background. If that application is playing audio, you wouldn't want the screensaver stepping on it.


• The screensaver runs in the Roku's low power mode, so the video processor is probably disabled during that.

Interestingly, it doesn't say you can't use the roVideoScreen, but I imagine that's just an oversight.

[renojim]

This is what RokuKevin said about the audio issue a little while back:
viewtopic.php?f=34&t=30635&p=186426#p186432

As for video players, the documentation says this under "Entry Points":
"roVideoPlayer and roAudioPlayer are not allowed to be run in a screensaver "

-JT

[dynamitemedia]

thanks i commented there as well...

since it made mention they wanted to get 2.6 out, that has been a few months back maybe now we can get some answers on when it will be available

[bishopthom]

on a screensaver side note....

does anyone know if dpms is supported over hdmi? if so, is there any interest in adding a blank screen saver that triggers a dpms power down? the included screensavers work great, but it would be handy for the roku to selectively shutdown an attached monitor.

just curious... thx!

---thom

[RokuKevin]

The Roku does not support dpms over hdmi. Adding this feature may also cause more confusion than benefits for our user base...

The screensaver cannot include roVideoPlayer either.... it is because the currently running channel has exclusive use of the hw resources needed to play video or audio. You can create a channel that has an application level screensaver that plays audio while the screensaver is running and the audioapp sample app is a good example of this technique.

--Kevin