NAME

Roku::RCP - Object approach to controlling RCP enabled Roku products, such as the Roku SoundBridge.

SYNOPSIS

    use Roku::RCP;

    # Connect to the sleeping Roku, wake him up and tell him to play
    # the All_Dynamic playlist
    my $rcp = new Roku::RCP('192.168.0.102');

    # You can leave out this whole if-statement if your Roku is already
    # connected to a media server (and thus not in standby mode).
    if (!$rcp->GetConnectedServer()) {
      print "Not connected to firefly. Connecting ...\n";
      die "Couldn't connect to Firefly\n" unless $rcp->ServerConnectByName("Firefly");
    }
    $rcp->PlayPlaylist("All_Dynamic") or die "No Can Do\n";
    $rcp->Shuffle("on");
    $rcp->Quit();

DESCRIPTION

Roku::RCP Gives you an object through which you can communicate with your Roku Control Protocol-enabled Roku product. For the most part, the commands are merely passed through onto the connection and the results are parsed and returned to you either in an array in list context, or a giant string in scalar context. Should the command fail, undef is returned.

You'll want to familiarize yourself with the Roku Control Protocol (RCP) by visting the Roku Labs site http://www.rokulabs.com and reading the RCP spec. Although this module provides some convenience functions, you'll need to have an understanding of the basic commands if you'd like to do anything more fancy.

METHODS

my $rcp = new Roku::RCP($hostname, %options)

Construct a new object.

    $rcp = new Roku::RCP('192.168.0.102', Debug=>1, RawResults=>1, Port=>5555, Timeout=>50);

If RawResults is set, you'll get back everything Roku sends back. If it's not set, you'll just get back the data without any metadata. You can probably use RawResults along with Port=>4444 to send non RCP commands over to the normal Roku telnet interface. The telnet interface listening on port 4444 is mostly operating system-type commands and aren't related to media playback. Using Roku::RCP to communicate with the regular telnet interface is a usage case that hasn't been tested, but it should work. The module uses AUTOLOAD to take whatever function you call and send that down the connection.

Be careful with RawResults because the data and metadata will be intermixed so if you have code expecting just the results, you'll be in for an unpleasant surprise.

$rcp->ServerConnectByName($server_name)

ServerConnectByName() Is a convenience function that takes a partial or complete media server name and tries to connect to it. An example of such would be "FireFly";

$rcp->PlayPlayList($playlist_name)

A convenience function that takes a partial or complete playlist name and tries to start playing it.

$rcp->PlayArtist($artist_name)

A convenience function that takes an exact, case-sensitive artist name and tries to play all the songs by that artist. Note that if you'd like to do partial matching, you'll have to first call $rcp->SearchArtists("vast"), get the resulting list back, pick one and then call PlayArtist() with that string.

$rcp->PlayAlbum($album_name)

A convenience function that takes an exact, case-sensitive album name and tries to play all the songs on that album. Note that if you'd like to do partial matching, you'll have to first call $rcp->SearchAlbums("visual audio sensory theat"), get the resulting list back, pick one and then call PlayAlbum() with that string.

$rcp->PlaySong($song_name)

A convenience function that takes a partial, case insensitive song name and tries to play all the songs matching that string.

$rcp->InsertSong($song_name)

A convenience function that takes a partial, case insensitive song name and tries to insert all matching songs into the queue and play them. Note that if the song/s is/are already in your queue, the position won't change and the next song in your queue will start playing.

$rcp->Quit()

Cleanly close the connection. This will get called automatically when the object is destroyed.

$rcp->ROKU_RCP_COMMAND($arg1, $arg2, ...)

Any commands not specifically listed here are considered to be RCP commands and sent along down the connection. Here are a few to wet your whistle: Next, Previous, Reboot, QueueAndPlay, GetTimeZone, ListServers, ListPlaylists. Generally the paradigm is that you connect to Roku, issue a command that lists out songs and then you QueueAndPlay. Roku assumes you mean the last listing of songs. Unless you want to wait for thousands and thousands of song titles to come back, you generally want to tell Roku to forgo sending you the entire list and just send you the total number. $rcp->SetListResultType("partial") is your friend. Take a look at how I did the PlayArtist() convenience function as a good starting place.

LEGALESE

Copyright 2007 by Robert Powers, all rights reserved. This program is free software, you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as Perl itself.

BUGS

This module is not 100% tested, but I use it every day, so it'll get better over time.

AUTHOR

2007, Robert Powers <batman@cpan.org>