none of my videos play

your channel focus and side icons are indeed set in the manifest file. You don't need to worry about the makefile for your channel to operate. You might want to post some of the code on the attributes of your mp4 files so we could see if there might be some error there, what you have posted is the metadata, which isn't going to show us what's going on. Also, if you are planning to have multiple videos and update them weekly, you might want to look at the videoplayer example (not the simplevideoplayer) because it's a good example of using xml files to populate poster screens and set the paths for files to stream. That way you can just add to your xml file (that could even be hosted on your site) when you add new videos rather than have to alter your actual channel. Whn the channel starts, it queries and parses the XML with all your video data.