An update on the progress of my plex app...
Things are a little slow going with the holidays, but I'm hoping to have something for you testers by the new year. Hopefully before.
I have dug into the generic transcoder a lot and I think I have worked out how it all works now. I THINK. My app will let you change the resolution and quality of the output, which worked out really well for testing. Word on the street is that the universal transcoder is just not an option for the video the Vizio TVs support, so low-powered or NAS servers might be out of luck unless you re-encode your media so it can direct play to the TV.
The documentation says that the Ethernet port on most of the devices can only handle up to 720 video. I think I have confirmed this. I can stream full quality 720 video over eithernet (where my transcoder will keep up), and it plays beautifully. 1080, even at the lowest quality, starts stuttering. Hopefully some of the newer devices have better results.
Wireless seems to be sadly slow on my TV. Of course, I know I have my TV located in a bad location for my wireless, so I plan to take a router closer to get a real test. I also tried it on a brand new Vizio TV, however, with unknown specs on the wifi router, and had roughly the same results. Basically, I can only stream at 320 resolution at full quality. The picture is really not terrible, but is a far cry from 1080 or even 720. 480, even at low quality starts to struggle a bit. Hopefully a better wireless connection will show better results. In all honesty, though, I think the video doesn't look much different in quality (from a very few quick checks) than Netflix gives me over the same connection. I don't use this particular TV a lot. Usually my kids do, so I haven't really looked at the quality on it much. However, I know if I move the a roku fairly near the TV, it streams full 1080 just fine. So it could be that the devices (or at least my device) just isn't really built for a high-quality streaming. This is where all you testers will come in helpful for me.
My app, when it is ready to test, will likely just pull the onDeck list and allow you to stream any of those movies from the beginning, or continue where it last left off. It will allow you to change the server IP and port (unfortunately, the framework doesn't expose enough functionality to automatically discover the servers), the video resolution and quality, and automatically decide if the video should transcode or direct play, or force transcode, or force direct play (which, if attempted on incompatible media, can cause the TV to shut down into an error mode for about 3 minutes).
So, those who want to test for me, please follow the instructions in this link and send me your developer code in a private message:
http://developer.yahoo.com/connectedtv/quickstart/CTV_QS_Deploying_TV_App_Software.html
Your code changes depending on the profile you are using on your machine. Also, system updates seem to cause that number to change.
I'll post more updates soon, and hopefully will have a testable app before long. If everything goes well in that initial testing, it should hopefully be a fairly easy step up to the next version that shows the entire library in full screen. Then we can start playing with tweaks, beautification, bug fixes, and other fun features.
