I’d like to ask those of you who are registered developers to help us improve the Developer Program. Please use this thread as an opportunity to give your feedback on the SDK (as a whole), documentation, development process, etc. We’d also love to hear from you about what resources we could provide that would make your experience with Channel development more productive and more successful.
I received my Roku on Wednesday March 10th and began developing immediately. I work for a large adult content provider so I had content in the proper format easily accessible. I started developing the channel for personal / “proof of concept” use not as a work assignment.
I found it great the amount of documentation that Roku provided (you literally need a few of them open at the same time for cross referencing). Since Roku only contains “sample” applications and not many “how to”. I started as most do by replacing the default XML / image sizing with my own. One problem I had from the beginning with my custom XML file which set me back a few hours and made me give up progress for the night was that I had descriptions that were 300-700 characters in length. I found out later that this causes a firmware crash but it wasn’t until after a lot of trial and error and frustration/device reboots.
The next steps involved creating the necessary .bif files which I found information on by googling the forums. (Googling the forums actually is very helpful as I have found many many things that have helped me progress through this route)
By Friday night I had user account/device linking completed (our content requires authentication).
I continued development over the weekend and by Sunday I had the following features implemented:
trailer support (not the 2 min feature offered by roku but a completely separate video)
star rating from xml not hardcoded
HD branded
resume support (along with display of % watched)
One thing I can say that would help the development process is some kind of “Wiki” where people can easily get the “secret remote codes” and also other random tips and tricks. (granted, you can use google)
Also, a quick “how to” would probably benefit a lot of people, even those with a lot of development experience. The reason is, it gets somebody on the proper route quickly. Even though the videoplayer application is pretty easy to get going – many do not understand that. People need a “step by step” guide on how to get the basic channel up and once they have that guide they would probably feel more comfortable “tinkering”.
Also, one thing I can say is the difference between the 2 example videoplayer applications is huge and can be a little daunting. You go from looking at 1 file of code that plays 1 video to looking at 12 files of code that read xml etc…
The development process as-far as creating the zip/uploading etc… was good.
One thing that was a bit of a pain was where you upload/edit your private channel on Roku.com. When I go to edit is it possible to make it already use the previous images used? It gets to be a hassle to have to reselect the HD/SD Poster art everytime. Other than that everything was a breeze.
A real bug tracking system for the SDK (posting bugs to the forum and then hoping Kevin sees it is not a bug tracking system)
Alternative programming language than BrightScript (well, I can ask)
More clarity about the efficiency of codecs you support, and a far wider range of supported codecs
Better responsiveness to posted questions (I will say that this has gotten way better in the past few weeks, when I started working with the SDK in January it was bad)
Include a cookie-cutter home streaming solution with the SDK for those who aren’t object-oriented programmers (or let everyone know well in advance if you plan to switch on uPNP etc. so they don’t waste their time coding home streaming solutions)
A real bug tracking system for the SDK (posting bugs to the forum and then hoping Kevin sees it is not a bug tracking system)
Keep up the good work guys…
A real bug tracking system for all bugs, not just SDK related; I’ve basically sidelined all development when I found that an (unconfirmed?) firmware bug is causing everything to rebuffer at 1 hour. Any visibility on priority for things like that would be a big morale boost.
(Yes, I have heard reports that re-encoding my entire library could work around this, maybe - but that’s an enormous project, and not really a fix).
Yes, I have couple of suggestion:
A) Brightscript/Channel Wizard… A program that will make thing easy for Rookie to input and delete, ect…
B) I understand that Roku can erect “Member only” channel for developer to watch several video of processing demo. Clear visual demo and maybe add subtitles…
Ditto on the Eclipse plugin. It’s quite an adjustment trying to learn and code in a completely new language with no syntax coloring or auto-completion.
Personally, I’d like more robust string processing in BrightScript. It’s very frustrating that I can’t use regular expressions.
But mostly, I have to echo some of the other comments people have made. My biggest limitation as a developer is the box itself. It has trouble playing a lot of content that I expected would be a piece of cake for it. And I’m not talking about unsupported formats. The box chokes on a large number of mp4 videos that can be found around the net. MSNBC’s podcasts are a perfect example. 14 minutes into any of these videos, the box re buffers and the audio and video get all out of sync. I know Roku is aware of this and planning a fix, but for a device that has been on the market as long as this one has and with as much competition on the horizon as there is, I would have expected things like this, issues with the basic functionality of the box, to be fixed a long time ago.
Overall, this is a fun platform to work with, it just still feels very immature.
I’ll definitely second a public bug tracker. I’ve seen a few issues and having to search through the forums to see if anyone else has had the issue is tedious and prone to failure.
A development emulator would be amazing. This could simplify the process so much. Maybe just have it point to the folder that contains the source, manifest, etc. so that we don’t have to redeploy the channel for every test iteration. That alone would save tons of development time.
A development emulator would be amazing. This could simplify the process so much. Maybe just have it point to the folder that contains the source, manifest, etc. so that we don’t have to redeploy the channel for every test iteration. That alone would save tons of development time.
For sure. An emulator made all the difference doing PocketPC and smartphone stuff with MS Visual Studio .NET compact/mobile frameworks. Being able to run and debug in the PocketPC emulator rather than going to the actual device each time was awesome and definitely saved me many an hour. I’d love to see the same here.
More examples would be nice. It seems a bit raw. Not at all like what I experienced when picking up Android or iPhone programming. A real ‘App Store’ experience would be good. I added a couple of your new channels and it involved going to different websites and using PayPal. Not nearly as impulse buy as Apple’s App Store. To developers with hopes of making profit it’d be nice to smooth this out.
Being able to just write in Java would be nice. Maybe something using XMLVM to convert Java programs if needed?
We are starting to work with the Roku SDK. I was surprised to find it appears to be Brightscript only.
We have an existing application that is a good fit for Roku box that runs on linux. this is ANSI-C posix
style application. Not too complex but we need to be able to GCC compile the code for the Roku HD box,
dowload it GDB debug it, etc. Can we know if this is possible, and a little better sense as to the
Roku HD box, like operating system (embedded linux?), chip ???, clock speed, etc? Once we have a better
feel for this, we can dive into further details concerning how to interface to on-screen OSD graphic overlay.
video, audio and so on.
Thanks please comment and let us know if we are on the right track here!
Channels for the Roku player must be written in BrightScript. If you’d like to discuss your specific application and what it might take to publish it on Roku, let me know.
Hopefully this is an appropriate place to respond about the survey…
The questions that asked about status of channel development were somewhat difficult to answer because (as a hobbyist) I have tried making a few different channels and I had different experiences with each, but the questions were worded only for a single channel. Maybe make those questions have multi-select answers (“I have completed a channel”, “I have channel in development”, “I gave up on a channel”, etc could all be true). Then the later ones say “if you chose X, answer here” but due to the first issue, I didn’t choose X even though it may also be true.
