Organized Local Streaming Development?
It is clear from reading the documentation and reviewing the discussion groups that developing a package which will allow people to stream from a local source will take a lot of doing. Is there a...
Forum Discussion
"daw3rd" wrote:
I'm not familiar with the SDK, but I'd say that requiring the user to set up a local webserver on the machine where they want to read media from is a only going to reach a very limited audience.
Is there any way to just point the channel at a networked file system and load the files directly? Perhaps when they add features for the (as yet unsupported) USB on the XR, the SDK will be extended to enable such a feature more easily.
No. The player needs a bunch of information about the content before it can play it, and to play the files themselves it needs a http server that can handle the Byte-Range request header. So you can't do anything without a local webserver of some kind.
I also don't think that most people's video collections will play properly on the Roku -- it appears to be very finicky about the format used (ie. my problems with it rebuffering every 2 minutes after playing fine for an hour).
The MythTV project might be a good direction to look for a stable server. Writing a Roku plugin for it shouldn't be a huge amount of effort and it has a large support community.
