The host scripts were written against the wrong reference. BrightScript is
Roku's language, the two API references read almost identically, and nothing
here can run either — so a call to an object that does not exist looked exactly
like a call to one that does. Verified on an XT245 and against BrightSign's
published reference; every item below was confirmed, not guessed.
THE ONE THAT COST A BOOT. `body$ = "{""width"":"` is not an escaped quote —
BrightScript has no escape sequences, so that is three adjacent literals with no
operator, and the compiler rejects the WHOLE FILE:
ScriptLoadError: Syntax Error. (compile error &h02) in SSD:/autorun.brs(196)
Not a broken feature — no player at all, on a display showing nothing. Built
with Chr(34) now.
THE ONE IN THE FIELD. MatchFiles takes a DIRECTORY plus a pattern and returns
nothing when the pattern contains a separator; we passed a full path as both
arguments. FileExists() could never return true, for any file, on any player.
That is exactly what a consultant hit: "[st-autozip] no autorun.zip on any
volume" printed while `dir SD:` listed autorun.zip. It also silently disabled
the entire self-update path. (Related: `autorun.zip_invalid` on his card is not
an accusation — it is the rename BrightSign's own example performs AFTER a
successful unpack. Our STORED-only insistence fixed a problem that was never
there; deflate32 is supported.)
Roku objects that do not exist here, each of which disabled a feature quietly:
roFileSystem (~20 sites — the update path could never mark a package applied),
roMessageDigest (verification returned false unconditionally and burned an
attempt counter), PostFromStringWithRetry (a snapshot request raised "member
function not found" from inside the event loop and took the player down).
Replaced with MoveFile/DeleteFile, roHashGenerator, and an async POST on a
message port, which is the only documented way to read a POST body.
Unpack() returns Void, so `if not package.Unpack(...)` was a type error dressed
as an error check; success is now proven by looking for the extracted file. And
Unpack() DELETES everything already in its target — unpacking an update to the
volume root would have erased the player's provisioning and its whole content
pool as a side effect of a routine upgrade. It stages to a directory of its own
and moves files into place, deliberately never overwriting screentinker.json.
Also: SetMode() takes one argument (rotation belongs to SetScreenModes, which
REBOOTS, so it only fires on a real change); GetStorageStatus is unreliable with
"USBn:"; a load-error names its resource in `uri`, not `url`.
server/test/brightscript-api-surface.test.js is the cheap thing that would have
caught all of it: a deny-list of Roku APIs plus the argument shapes and literal
forms that compile and then do nothing. It cannot prove the scripts are right;
it stops these specific mistakes coming back. It has already earned its keep —
it caught a comment I had broken while writing this change.
Verified on hardware: the player loads clean from the NVMe, restores its cached
playlist and plays BEFORE the server connects, fetches media with the new
?rev= revision, and registers against alpha rc4.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01Uaeo9MvzKoyXuN6ZsbhtkL
