Roku Developer Program

[tamekariley]

Hi. I have a Roku channel that I developed. I was initially using direct publisher and a tool by Rovidx.  When it stopped working for me, I found a developer who switched me from Direct Publisher to SDK.  I asked for instructions on how to do it myself, which I preferred, and he agreed, but never did. He wanted me to keep coming to him.  Now, he's no longer responsive and I have been unable to update my channel, which is what I was afraid of. 

All I know is that he seemed to use Android Studio, to generate the APK for Amazon and generated the PKG for Roku in Atom.  Fine.  The channel is on Roku, FireTV and AndroidTV.  I know enough to be able to look at the code pattern and see where I can add the video ID.  I've downloaded the JSON file, but to add the few videos to the lines of code and generate the package to update my channels is where I'm stuck.  Of course YouTube University and Google are no help.  I haven't been able to find anything in the forums.  I know people edit and upload theirs all the time, but this will be my first time.  All of my experience was with DP.  Can anyone point me in the right direction.

[37mediagroup · Accepted solution]

I'm like you more of a DP channel builder, with some coding knowledge. I was able to build Test channels using sdk, and customize them fairly well. Even got unique logos & videos to play.

My suggestion, would be are you able to decipher where each videos code starts and stops? (including brackets, commas etc), and try copying and pasting a video, then just replace its assets like video url, thumbnails, description and video ID#?  I would just try adding one to start, and see if that works. Obviously, keep the 'Original Copy' and then rename the new file with todays date or version2 or something.

You can read thru things here: https://developer.roku.com/docs/features/features-overview.md

[tamekariley]

Yes, that’s what I was saying. I can decipher the pattern enough to handle the coding part but wasn’t sure how/where to edit it and turn it into an uploadable file for SDK. I’ve since learned that I don’t need to re-submit a file and any changes I make to the code, once saved, will appear instantly. I was also happy to learn that submitting the link to the code in Direct Publisher also worked. Thank you for your reply. Took me a few persistent days but I think we’ve finally cracked the code. *pun intended* lol

[37mediagroup]

Nice!  Yeah, I used to re-submit my channel each change but learned that just changing the file/code Roku re-crawls it and ingests it approximately every 6 hours. So fyi, it may not always update 'immediately', but I think its periodic or every 6 hours tbh.

I'm a little confused, you mention submitting the link to the code in Direct Publisher?  I thought you had a SDK channel. You can't mix & match right?! Why would updating to link in DP update your SDK channel?  Maybe its a caveat or 'glitch' to the Roku Developer Dashboard or I'm confusing things about what you're saying.

[tamekariley]

No, I created a second channel to test in but I couldn't figure out what to upload for the SDK.  I tried the JSON file itself, then tried zipping it, but that didn't work. Then I remembered the Direct Publisher had a place for a JSON link, so I switched the test channel from SDK to DP and entered the JSON link to the code I was working on and It worked.  I then noticed that my live channel also updated every time I edited my code.