Roku Developer Program

[destruk]

Simple curiosity - I have a ROKU with a USB port, and a second ROKU without USB. Would it be possible for me to use the webserver sample app to stream video files from the USB roku to a custom app on the Non-USB roku? How would the stream url be formatted to point to the content? ie http://192.168.1.3/ext1://filename ?

[RokuKevin]

Yes it would be possible. The web_server example listens on port 8888, so the url would be of the form:

http://192.168.1.120:8888/yourFilename.html

Where yourFilename.html is a file added to wwwRoot = ext1: (your usb drive)

--Kevin

[destruk]

Very cool. Thankyou!

[destruk]

That is neat. You can basically host your own server that way with no pc involved.

[scyber]

"destruk" wrote:
That is neat. You can basically host your own server that way with no pc involved.

It would be interesting to test the Roku's hardware limitations. That is, could it stream a file from its webserver to another roku while simultaneously streaming a file from the internet.

[destruk]

How would that be much different from streaming 6 or 7 rokus from the same webserver unit?
edited...if you mean to find out if the box could play a movie as well as stream a different movie somewhere else, you'd have to modify their webserver example to make that happen.

[Arwen]

It's very nice that the new Roku SDK will have more features available
to developers. I hope to see some interesting projects and products
come out of the enhancements.

One thing to note, is that a general purpose computer still has some
serious advantages over the Roku. My setup includes a very low power
PC, (5 watts), which is actually about the same size as my Roku XR.
It does DHCP and HTTP for the Roku. (And other things for me un-related
to the Roku.)

When I first bought my Roku XR, I had nothing that used DHCP. For
straight forward testing, I enabled DHCP on my broadband router
and found the Roku XR worked fine. But in the long run I wanted a
bit of control so I added DHCP to my minature server. Now I have
the Roku always consuming the same IP, (DHCP based on MAC), plus
control over DHCP lease time.

So depending on someones setup, a mostly Roku environment may or
may not work well.

Just my 1 cents worth, (it was not worth 2 cents :).

[kbenson]

In my testing I got ~13 megabits when trying to accept data synchronously. You may be able to get more when using sockets asynchronously. I suspect the NIC isn't designed to handle high load, and getting much more out of the hardware may not be possible (most streams don't need more than 20 megabit anyways).

[RokuKevin]

I think you meant "most streams do't need more than 2 Mbps anyway" ??

--Kevin

[kbenson]

"RokuKevin" wrote:
I think you meant "most streams do't need more than 2 Mbps anyway" ??

Actually, I was thinking of 1080p content and just too lazy to look up actual requirements. 😉

It was meant to imply that Roku may have chosen a chipset that can't really hit 100 Mbps (many can't) as it wasn't really required for a successful device when first introduced (and may still not be), and may have reduced cost. I figure that accounting for overhead in BrightScript and the synchronous nature of my test, the underlying hardware can probably hit around 20 Mbps, which should be more than sufficient for current streaming needs.