Category Titles Above Videos

Archived
1

On Roku’s example image, it shows the categories of videos having a title above:

(https://blog.roku.com/developer/files/2016/09/channetv.png[/img)]

Specifically you can see “goofy movies” there at the bottom.

However, on my channel there are no such titles. So everything looks like a big pile of thumbnails.

Anybody know what I need to add into my .json to get those on there?

thanks

2

It is showing on mine. Although, I think I remember early on checking in and they weren’t. Maybe they need to download and cache the first time. I did have them on my json feed, but it seemed in the checklist I needed to manually use the Categories entry instead. Did you encounter that? Wondering if I did something wrong but in the end it worked, just had to associate via tags. Would prefer to have more manual control over it via the json file.

3

Thanks for the reply Pasnow.

I have mine set to manual categories as well and am associating via tags. No luck so far.

Has anyone found a way to put the Category titles in the JSON code itself?

4

Ok so I discovered today when I happened to look at my screen at a weird angle that the category titles ARE written above the videos, but the font color is almost white.

Anyone know how to adjust this?

thanks

5

In your developer Dashboard there’s a “Branding” section in the checklist. If you click in there it seems there’s options for “Background Color” and “Font Color: Light/dark”. Changing either of those two should get it changed. Just be aware because this is in the checklist it’ll likely need to be resubmitted and go back thru the queue.

6

thanks Pasnow for your reply.

i did check that section…it was already set to have text show as ‘dark’. so i’m tweaking the settings on that page a bit to see if i can get my text showing. i’ll see if it works when they approve the update.

7

I found that they only seem to showup if you select a light background and dark text, anything else doesn’t seem to show them, even when I set it to dark barkground and light txt, they do not show up.. Only light background and dark text made it work right.. Someone told me that it does work properly though but only on thier 4K TV, on a 1080p and 720p tvs it does not..

8

Currently having this same issue…
Categories display dark in preview, but on device show very light against a light background… almost impossible to see.
Any fix?

9

We ended up having too many problems with direct publisher.

HLS feed category would sometimes just disappear on us. Couldn’t get the colors to update. Didn’t like having everything dumped in one json file.

In the end, we rebuilt the channel with the new SDK.

10

Hey not sure this is the right forum for this? but my catagories hangs up in my channel editing page? It ALWAYS stays red no matter what i do.. heres the screenshot

[upload|Bnl1CuvUAgc5ofhU2+XSCA==]

what do i need to do? this prevents me from publishing my channel when finished editing! and when i try to add a catagory it alwasy reads invalid no matter what options or boxes i check?

11

“apsrmusic” wrote:
Hey not sure this is the right forum for this? but my catagories hangs up in my channel editing page? It ALWAYS stays red no matter what i do.. heres the screenshot

[upload|Bnl1CuvUAgc5ofhU2+XSCA==]

what do i need to do? this prevents me from publishing my channel when finished editing! and when i try to add a catagory it alwasy reads invalid no matter what options or boxes i check?
Send me your feed and I’ll check it out and see what is going on with it.

12

I found regardless of my feed, the Roku DP Publishing checklist required me to add Categories, and their respective Tags into the checklist anyway. Make sure you are adding both Categories AND Tags in, and not leaving the field blank. .

13

I this there is a bug on the Roku web site because I can’t fint a way to fix this categories, I try every posible way and does not work. The only way I fix it was by creating categories on InstantTVChannels and telling Roku Website not to use the categories from Roku but instead use the categories from the InstantTVChannel.

14

I am still waiting. Any fix for this yet?

15

Jonathansafa, send me your feed link. My categories are working just fine. Here is category example from my working feed file:

“categories”: [
{
“name”: “What’s New This Week”,
“query”: “WhatNew”,
“order”: “most_recent”
},
{
“name”: “Your Community VNA”,
“query”: “CVNA”,
“order”: “most_recent”
}
]

Make sure in each item has a tag element that corresponds to a category, for example:
“tags”: [
“CVNA”
]

Hope this helps.

16

“mediadisconnect” wrote:
Jonathansafa, send me your feed link. My categories are working just fine. Here is category example from my working feed file:

“categories”: [
{
“name”: “What’s New This Week”,
“query”: “WhatNew”,
“order”: “most_recent”
},
{
“name”: “Your Community VNA”,
“query”: “CVNA”,
“order”: “most_recent”
}
]

Make sure in each item has a tag element that corresponds to a category, for example:
“tags”: [
“CVNA”
]

Hope this helps.
Hey there, the categories are showing up - it’s just that they are really hard to see. There is a white background, and the labels are basically white - even though in the “Branding” section I have “Text Color” set to “Dark.”
It’s the strangest thing. Thoughts?

17

This MIGHT be a bug with Direct Publisher. I will test it out tomorrow.

You might be forced to just use a dark color/image as your background for the text to show up. If you do end up using an image for your background be sure to use a color overlay to mute detail in the image and help the text pop.

18

“mediadisconnect” wrote:
This MIGHT be a bug with Direct Publisher. I will test it out tomorrow.

You might be forced to just use a dark color/image as your background for the text to show up. If you do end up using an image for your background be sure to use a color overlay to mute detail in the image and help the text pop.
I think it most likely is a bug in the DP.
But that means so many channels would be affected by this? And I’m hardly seeing it in the forums.. so strange..!
Also, is there a way to increase the size of these Category labels?

Thanks!

19

There has been some mention of this in previous threads:
https://forums.roku.com/viewtopic.php?f=100&t=102543

Direct Publisher is fairly new with not as large an adoption compared to the current SDK or SceneGraph. Also, most channels use a dark background so most users aren’t even aware of the bug.

There is no way to increase the font size.

20

Step 1 - enter your JSON feed and select “Specified in Feed” option then save.
Step 2 - Go to categories and select “From feed” option and then save.
Step 3 - Go to Feed Status and hit the Refresh button
Step 4 - Wait 3 to 10 minutes then hit the Refresh button again
You should either get a message for invalid feed or a green check mark that the feed is good to go and ready to publish or update.