issues with Emby home screen on Roku Ultra

[speechles 2055]

  

3 hours ago, StuBailey said:

Well I'm not concerned if it's non standard and I'm not asking for it and If I were doing the programing it would be easy to do. And you can cash that in the bank.

 

Horizontal Row Scrolling

There are three horizontal item scrolling options for the RowList node class controlled by the rowFocusAnimationStyle field.

• Setting the rowFocusAnimationStyle field to floatingFocus causes the focus indicator to float left or right until it reaches the end of the row, at which point the focus will stay fixed on the first or last item in the row, and the items will scroll left or right.
• Setting the rowFocusAnimationStyle field to fixedFocusWrap causes each row to wrap around when navigation reaches the first or last item in the row, as long as the row contains enough items to fill the row. If the row does not contain enough items to fill the row, the focus will float left and right.
• Setting the rowFocusAnimationStyle field to fixedFocus causes the focus to stay fixed on the first item in each row. As the user scrolls, the previous selected item goes off the screen. Scrolling continues until the last item is reached with no wrapping.

 

https://developer.roku.com/docs/references/scenegraph/list-and-grid-nodes/rowlist.md

It is possible to have "floating focus with wrapping" but it must be custom built. We have some builds with this enabled.

 

Take a peek at the rowlist documentation. That is what we are using on horizontal rows.

Then we use the focusXOffset to control how far from the 0,0 edge we place the focus. The focusXOffset is 100.

3 hours ago, StuBailey said:

...and If I were doing the programing it would be easy to do. And you can cash that in the bank.

You mean to program the float to have wrap-around? I already provided a proof-of-concept that introduced floating focus with wrapping and ebr has us shelve it as not many users would understand they could wrap to front and wrap to back after moving beyond the ends of the lists. Or do you mean you can code around this bug easily? Because it isn't so easy as other programming languages. It is much more of a challenge.

[Gilgamesh_48 1240]

My programming skills are way out of date BUT it seems to me that the "solution" would be if you scrolled right past the last item you could just do whatever is done to place the focus on the first item when first scrolling that row. 
On the other side you can just set the pointer to whatever is the last item and correct the rest to fit.
Neither action seems at all hard implement or at all hard to understand from a user point of view.

But, again, my programming skills are well dated as the first programming languages I used were assembler (on IBM platforms), COBOL, C (no ++ or anything else), FORTH (when I consulted on an automatic deep space telescope) and Pascal (which was actually my favorite). The general programming methods I learned way back then still seem to apply.
Since the current position is always known and the location of the first and last items in the list is always known it should be simple to jump quickly and seamlessly to either end of the list. 

However I will readily admit that it is possible that modern languages may not allow what I propose to be easily or simply accomplished as it became clear that as languages modernized many simple and easy things became harder under the "advanced" languages. 
But I worked in programming through C++ and C# and some other languages up until i did not want to expend the effort anymore to keep up. 

I am not being critical but it does seem that having "wrap" in the float category is not particularly hard. 
But one more time there could be idiosyncrasies that are not obvious to an ancient programmer like me.  

I also remember a coupe of the adages I learned shortly after starting programming, "Easy to use is easy to say" and "Nothing is idiot proof to a sufficiently motivated idiot."  

Edit: One thing I need to say is i no longer have a dog in this fight as I am using Android platforms almost exclusively for my Emby functionality.

Edited March 29, 2025 by Gilgamesh_48

[speechles 2055]

34 minutes ago, Gilgamesh_48 said:

My programming skills are way out of date BUT it seems to me that the "solution" would be if you scrolled right past the last item you could just do whatever is done to place the focus on the first item when first scrolling that row. 
On the other side you can just set the pointer to whatever is the last item and correct the rest to fit.
Neither action seems at all hard implement or at all hard to understand from a user point of view.

Roku has a native scrolling mechanism that steals focus. You can only react to observers set upon fields that the scrolling mechanism interacts with. But when the scrolling reaches the beginning or end of the list it passes control to onKeyEvents. At that point you can react to keypresses not intercepted by the scrolling mechanism. So exactly as you describe is how it works. Once you reach the end and press right you go back to the beginning. At the beginning if you press left you go to the end.

The OP of this thread isn't concerned about which focus Float or Fixed is used. They are concerned because on fixed half the focus is cut off on the left. Then with float it can wind up with half the focus cut off on the right. This issue is usually caused by overscan on the TV causing a zoom effect. The TV display needs to be on normal where it isn't trying to stretch or zoom any of the content on the screen. That is what this thread was initially for.

Then people started to wonder why does fixed allow wrap and float doesn't? It is a Roku limitation in their implementation. Doesn't mean we cannot wrap the float. That is something that can be done if enough people wanted that.

Edited March 29, 2025 by speechles

[Gilgamesh_48 1240]

6 minutes ago, speechles said:

Roku has a native scrolling mechanism that steals focus. You can only react to observers set upon fields that the scrolling mechanism interacts with. But when the scrolling reaches the beginning or end of the list it passes control to onKeyEvents. At that point you can react to keypresses not intercepted by the scrolling mechanism. So exactly as you describe is how it works. Once you reach the end and press right you go back to the beginning. At the beginning if you press left you go to the end.

The OP of this thread isn't concerned about which focus Float or Fixed is used. They are concerned because on fixed half the focus is cut off on the left. Then with float it can wind up with half the focus cut off on the right. This issue is usually caused by overscan on the TV causing a zoom effect. The TV display needs to be on normal where it isn't trying to stretch or zoom any of the content on the screen. That is what this thread was initially for.

Then people started to wonder why does fixed allow wrap and float doesn't? It is a Roku limitation in their implementation. Doesn't mean we cannot wrap the float. That is something that can be done if enough people wanted that.

As i said "high level" languages often limit flexibility. But it seems to me that the need for wrap is obvious and the Android platform is every bit as bad as the Roku's. I do not have "wrap" in Android and, without the Roku having that ability I would not have stayed with Roku as long as I have. 
I should be thankful that this has come up again as it made me look at Android again and I have found that the limitations and generally poor remote control operation of the Android platform should not prevent me from using them. My Shield is VASTLY superior to Roku in its live TV functionality. In particular the channels that had stability problems on my Rokus do not have near as many on my Android devices also some other apps i regularly use preform better on my Shield. Paramount+ and Peacock are two strong examples.  

I still do not like the Android interfaces much but the extra stability and enhanced functionality makes using Android preferable for the present. Even ESPN works better on my Shield.

I really appreciate all the work that has gone into the Emby Roku app. I know I am behind driving some of the fixes and augmentations. However Roku has done so many stupid and intrusive things that using another platform is just better for me at this point.

My Rokus remain connected and i will be testing them from time to time they are just not my goto devices for streaming anymore. 

I wish I could have the basic Roku interface and the snappiness of my Android devices combined somehow WITHOUT all the clutter and intrusiveness Roku keeps forcing on its users. But that is not to be. 

FWIW: My Shield is now my best streamer as I have found that there is a way to eliminate almost all the crap from the interface. But i still do not like much of the basic functionality, like the stupid way FF and RW are implemented and the extremely poor use of bif files on Android but i am not going to fight about that at this time. I will save that fight for when I feel more motivated and have a bit more energy.

[critchy 11]

FWIW. Please don't remove the wraparound. I really prefer it, missed it everyday that it was gone previously and was very, very pleased to see it had come back.

If anyone is having unbearable problems with it, maybe they could just not use that option. Instead of changing it for everyone else who is quite happy with it.

I guess I'm not good with change either!