Which Roku device should I develop for?

Question

Coming from a strong front end dev background to connected devices I learnt that I should always develop for the lowest common denominator when it came to unified clients. For standard CE-HTML style dev I found it's mainly low end 2011 blu rays that seem to be the worst for performance. But now I'm starting dev for Roku devices so which device should I dev for?

Answer 1

If you want your app to reach all devices then develop for the roku firmware 3.x series. The main things to keep in mind for compatibility are:

For the roUrlTransfer object, use setPort instead of setMessagePort.

The 2D API only supports 90 degree rotation on 3.1 firmware

If you encounter screen flashing in the 2D API, you may want to draw to a bitmap and then draw to the screen instead of directly to the screen

Execution of most things except for drawing to roImageCanvas will be slower on older devices. ImageCanvas may be faster on older devices

Less bitmap memory is available on older, 3.1 firmware

Maximum project size after zipping is around 700k on older devices, 50mb on newer devices, but suggested maximum size on all platforms is 500k.

Set minimum firmware to 3.0 or lower to target old devices and never ever click the cramfs button.

If you use roGridScreen, you need to store all grid data in an array and destroy the grid screen before launching other screens and recreate it when returning to the grid, otherwise display corruption may occur.

In-place upgrade functions should work, but in-app purchases have not been tested on 3.x, even if they may have been implemented.