Forum Discussion
The biggest drawback to the DP is that everytime you make a change like add or remove a video everyone has to update thier player.
I'm not sure what you mean here. If you update your feed file, Roku automatically ingests it on a daily basis. The changes are then pushed to every player that has your channel. Users do not need to manually update their player to obtain the changes.
thats exactly what I mean... With the old standard api player I kept an xml file on my server that was downloaded everytime the player was opened.. So if I added or removed a video or added 250 videos they were immediate..
With DP they package the json file into the app itself, so the oly way to get the new videos is to update the channel after Roku decides to ingest the new json file.. Sure it lowers traffic to the server but it eliminates the ability to create a new live feed on the fly. for instance: you have a live event you want on a ppv, so you create a new "video" in the json files.. you can't just tell the end user, oh just close and reopen or reboot your roku. and try again. You have to tell them to go to the channel but don't enter it, press ^ select check for updates. wait for the channel to update. if it didn't update, (which happens more often then not) remove the channel, restart the roku, readd the channel. then if ROKU injested the new json you should SHOULD have the new video.. Usually by the time we get to "remove the channel and reboot and readd it in, the person will at the least comment, "Wow, this is ridiculous, how come I never had to do this before.".. many just ask for a refund.. So ow, in order to do a live ppv, as the publisher I have to create a 24/7 live feed at least 2 days before the ppv, update the channel AND make sure the feed is working the whole time, becuse once a day the DP will check to see if files that are indexed are available if it doesn't find them it doesn't list the video (feed) as available.. I had an instance where we took our servers down at 3am to do maintainance, it was back online by 3:30.. but ROKU checked all of our videos while we were down, so it unindexed the entire channel until the next day when it checked again for the existance of the video files..
They did the samething with the images.. the video thumbnails do not resolve sometimes for 12-24 hours.. It's just not end user support friendly..
ANyway, the DP is just very clunky and not very friendly for support..