Roku OS 15.3 has started landing on some Roku TVs even though Roku still lists the release as a developer beta under NDA, with no public release note and no timeline for the wider rollout. It surfaced through a reader tip rather than any announcement, which is a strange way to ship software to retail sets.
I went through what has actually been documented and there is genuinely nothing in it aimed at us. It is all developer plumbing. There is a new captionRenderArea field on the Video node so apps can decide where captions sit when video is not full screen, with options to keep the old full-screen behaviour, follow the current video bounds, or set x, y, width and height by hand, plus control over font scaling and whether safe margins are preserved. Then SceneGraph fields gain Double values, BrightScript picks up isNumber, isString and isFloatingPoint checks, associative arrays get a values function ordered by key, roTimeSpan reports elapsed milliseconds and microseconds as LongInteger, and animated images can rotate and scale around an arbitrary point instead of the top-left corner.
The caption change is the only one I expect to ever see with my own eyes. Captions on Roku currently sit where a full screen says they should, which means they land over the interface or drift off the video entirely on preview and multi-window screens. That has bugged me for years. It is a channel-side fix though, so it arrives app by app whenever developers bother, and plenty never will.
So if 15.3 turns up on your set, do not go looking for a new home screen. Has anyone had it land yet, and did one single visible thing change?
I went through what has actually been documented and there is genuinely nothing in it aimed at us. It is all developer plumbing. There is a new captionRenderArea field on the Video node so apps can decide where captions sit when video is not full screen, with options to keep the old full-screen behaviour, follow the current video bounds, or set x, y, width and height by hand, plus control over font scaling and whether safe margins are preserved. Then SceneGraph fields gain Double values, BrightScript picks up isNumber, isString and isFloatingPoint checks, associative arrays get a values function ordered by key, roTimeSpan reports elapsed milliseconds and microseconds as LongInteger, and animated images can rotate and scale around an arbitrary point instead of the top-left corner.
The caption change is the only one I expect to ever see with my own eyes. Captions on Roku currently sit where a full screen says they should, which means they land over the interface or drift off the video entirely on preview and multi-window screens. That has bugged me for years. It is a channel-side fix though, so it arrives app by app whenever developers bother, and plenty never will.
So if 15.3 turns up on your set, do not go looking for a new home screen. Has anyone had it land yet, and did one single visible thing change?
