Sun Jun 05, 2016 12:45 am
Perfect topic for what I wanted to talk about.
I started messing around with developing a Roku channel last night.
The "Hello World" example I found first was useful in demonstrating how to upload stuff to your Roku, but aside from that it was utterly useless. But then again, was writing a "Hello, World" program ever satisfying? Or useful beyond the very important step that at least you learned how to compile and execute a program and maybe a small bit of syntax? (BrightScript is scripting - they aren't even compiling it!)
The tutorials all seemed very slim and seemed to expect us to just dig into the BFM (Big Effin' Manual) to grok all the details. Apologies if I missed a link to better tutorials or documentation. I'm sure the reference manuals are great reference manuals. That doesn't make them useful as a tool to learn though.
But there were other good examples.
And by example is how I've learned a lot of what I know about programming. To look at the results and stare at the code and understand how they did that is better than explaining in detail what each statement means (at least at an introductory level).
videoplayer was much better because that's what I really want to do. I want to host a bunch of videos and stream them to my TV, many of which are stored on hard drives.
Why don't I just use Roku Media Player?
That would be too easy!
But I saw how that works and it works fine, but all the links to the videos and all the descriptions are hardcoded into the XML files on the server.
What we really need now is a program that will generate these XML files...and I'm sure there probably is one.
It's one of those ideas that I had for a split second...."I should write this tool" followed quickly by "I'm sure a hundred other people have already written this tool."
"And quite possibly one of them even might have done a good job."
