My Media - Your Music and Video on the Roku DVP
My Media A simple personal media server and channel for streaming your music, video, and photo collection to your Roku MyMedia is a "private channel" which means you install it by clicking on a link instead of finding it by browsing through the Roku channel store. The installation of MyMedia is a bit more involved than most of the private channels you encounter because it requires that special software be running on both your Roku (the channel) and your personal computer (the MyMedia server.) Stick with it and soon you'll be listening to your music collection, watching your own movies, and browsing your own photos all streamed to your television through your Roku. Add the channel to your Roku! This is the place to ask questions if you have any! You can tell from the length of this thread that quite a few people use MyMedia and they love to help each other out. You can also check out our wiki and our Frequently Asked Questions page. Features so far: * Stream MP3's and WMA's from your Windows, Mac, or Linux computer over your local network to your Roku DVP. * Music is organized on your Roku using the same directory system you have on your desktop. * MP3 ID3 tags provide metadata about the music * Album art is displayed where available. * Video (See encoding instructions in later posts) * Uses your existing organization scheme. Just tell it where you keep your Music and Video. * Music Shuffle / Loop forever * Playlists * Photo Browsing * All open source. Artists, developers, testers, and writers are all welcome to join in and lend a hand to make this the media player we all want it to be. Enjoy! -Brian Stop reading now unless you're interested in installing MyMedia in developer mode instead of using the private channel mechanism Ok, you're still reading. I guess you want to do things the hard way. MyMedia is an open source project that encourages contributions from the community. As such, we also have a process to help you install MyMedia in developer mode so that you can tweak the channel code and contribute changes back to the community. If you're interested in doing this, follow these instructions: Download it Here and follow the instructions at that page to get things set up. Technical development group http://groups.google.com/group/mymedia-roku-developers/ Main GitHub Page http://github.com/netguy204/roku_media_server/ EDIT: Moved Video from being a planned feature to being a deployed feature. EDIT: Added link to developers group. EDIT: Changed download link to direct link EDIT: Changed name to My Media (from My Music) EDIT: Added Mac link, photo browsing is official planned feature now EDIT: Updated primary links to point at new project page EDIT: Tips n' hacks link EDIT: Retooled now that we're a private channelHow Do I Start Developing a Channel?
Step 1: Sign up as developer at http://www.roku.com/developer/ Step 2: Download SDK from https://owner.roku.com/Developer/DevHome Step 3: Read through the documentation starting with the Developer Guide. Step 4: Continue going through the BrightScript Reference and Component Reference Step 5: Modify the simplevideoplayer example to point to an example stream of your own to confirm that it plays Step 6: Modify the videoplayer example to create a channel with xml feeds that allows browsing of multiple files Step 7: Check the other examples and the Component reference for pertinent features you may want to add to your channel. Step 8: Review the Design Guidelines and the "Before Publishing Checklist" at the end of the Developer Guide to check your channel design Step 9: Submit your channel for publishing by Roku Step 10: We are currently reviewing channel submissions on Thursdays. Assuming your channel meets the Design Guidelines and there are no legal issues, it may take a couple weeks after your submission for your channel to actually be published in the channel store. This forum is a good place to ask about issues the docs didn't cover on your way to developing your channel. --KevinHLS Troubleshooting
This post will attempt to gather the common HLS issues and solutions that people are running into when rolling out solutions. The Encoding guide in the SDK will include much more detail, but this post and follow on comments should gather community knowledge as we are all working out our solutions... 1) When using an HLS Live Sliding Segment Window, Roku recommends 8x 10 second segments. The HLS spec minimum of 3 segments does not allow for any variance in bandwidth or latency. Roku's 8x10sec segment window drastically reduces rebuffers. 2) HLS Live is particularly sensitive to uploading the .m3u8 and .ts segments in a timely manner to the CDN. Timestamps and sequence numbers for all variant streams must be aligned and present on the CDN when they are included in an .m3u8. Please see the encoding guide for a script that can help you monitor your live streams for these problems. 3) The default MinBandwidth is set to 250 (250k) so that audio only streams are excluded from the playlist as Roku can't play them. Video on a TV really should be 800k or higher. 4) Earlier versions of Wowza specified the bandwidth at 64k by default. So these Wowza streams were excluded by Roku by default. When streaming from wowza, be sure to set the minBandwidth meta-data parameter correctly. You need to set it low enough so that your video streams are all included and high enough so that the audio only streams are excluded. Or set the bandwidth of your streams correctly on the wowza server. 5) If your HLS streams are less than 1.5 Mb/s, they may take very long in the preloading phase. Roku considers this a bug in the current firmware, but there is a workaround. Instead of setting content metadata StreamBitrates = [0] for your HLS stream, set it to the actual bandwidth of your stream when it is less than 1.5 Mb/s. Example for 900kbps stream: StreamBitrates = [900] 6) When there are discontinuities in your HLS stream, be sure that the PIDs of the audio and video do not change. The Roku firmware currently has a bug where we do not search for new audio and video PIDs on these discontinuities. So the workaround is to make sure you use the same audio and video PIDs for the entire length of the stream. --Kevin
SDK documentation: links to fix, missing/broken/etc
Starting this thread to enumerate issues in the docs that have to be fixed. There is a bunch of these suckers, which is annoyance but more importantly stops in their tracks novices, who are not used to such quirks (example). So let's list them here so they will be fixed... "inshallah". I'll start with much rejoicing: Screensaver documentation is apparently M.I.A., needs to be added to wiki. See viewtopic.php?f=34&t=69276#p439457 fixed: roChannelStore, ifGetMessagePort/ifSetMessagePort links are broken fixed roTextureManager does not list "Supported Events" (compare) . It has associated port (if?etMessagePort) and should point to what it may get. There is at least one event it gets, roTextureRequestEvent - it should be linked from that page. ifMessageDialog fails to mention which methods are not available in fw3. For details, see viewtopic.php?f=34&t=69825#p441250 [Would be nice if the documentation mentioned this but Firmware 3.x is deprecated so probably this will not happen - RokuJoel] Does roTextureManager really maintain LRU cache of resources, flushing the old ones as not to run out of memory (if so should be documented!) - or is it an urban legend? See viewtopic.php?f=34&t=69730#p441106 fixed Nov'14 roOneLineDialogEvent info seems to mislead on support for buttons, see viewtopic.php?f=34&t=69839 ifListScreen apparently does not support SetBreadcrumbText() in fw3, document it; viewtopic.php?f=34&t=69948 [Again, unlikely that we will address this as fw 3.x is deprecated - RokuJoel] Please add further your discoveries.
Eclipse plugin for Brightscript
I've thrown together a quick and dirty Eclipse plugin containing a very basic BrightScript file editor with syntax coloring and tab/indent preferences only. It's beta quality and doesn't have the bells and whistles of full language support, but this plugin should be a step up from using a plain-text editor. The keywords list is a subset of the complete list, and the categories are not complete yet - but it's a start. This plugin has only been tested on Eclipse 3.5 (Galileo) so far, but it should work on 3.6 (I'll upgrade & test in the next week or so). A full-featured plugin (i.e. syntax checking, auto-completion/suggestion, templates, on-line help, builder, debugger, project wizards, etc.) *may* be in the works if there's sufficient interest from both the developer community and Roku. I'll be posting at least a few updates to this plugin over the next couple of weeks, so I've set up an Eclipse update site to make things easier for anyone interested: Using the typical Eclipse software install mechanism (Help->Install New Software), the eclipse update site URL to add to your Eclipse instance via the above dialog's Add button is: http://www.domhain.com/eclipse/updates The above website has absolutely nothing but the plugin on it at the moment, so any feedback (which is very much welcome) should be posted to this thread for now. Enjoy.Eclipse Plugin for Brightscript
Is available within eclipse at the following update site: http://rokudev.roku.com/updates/ Bare bones eclipse plugin guide available here: http://rokudev.roku.com/rokudev/eclipsePluginGuide.pdf Let us know what you think. The plugin now supports eclipse v3.7 Indigo. --Kevin
