Roku Developer Program

[lhgrubbs]

Is it possible to click on a link via the internet that passes the video's URL to my Roku Box and launches the video automatically. So on my TV I have a browser open in a separate window, a website offers HD content. I want to click on that HD video and have it launch via the roku box on the TV. I have my roku box registered with Roku.

[gonzotek]

It's possible, but nobody's doing it yet. I've got something cooking that will be available some time or other. There are a number of number of caveats (video and the server it is hosted by has to be 100% Roku compatible, for instance).

[lhgrubbs]

It seems to be possible with a custom channel (like when you side load an application it starts immediately). or to have a HD link and a special browser function that would post it to your TV. There would be a lot of benefits to this level of integration. So if you are surfing the web in a custom Roku Channel with a browser and you could launch it right there.
Is this possible? is it already done?

If you did a roku search (Google search on the back end) for HD content the resulting data set could be parsed dynamically into the custom custom channel. Then browsed and viewed.

[YungBlood]

I've started a project that is similar, although VERY far from complete. I have started making a very basic Roku web browser. I can see the possibility of using it to navigate to a video stored on a website, and being able to follow a link and have the video start up. It's nowhere close to pre-alpha yet... but my preliminary tests are working. 🙂 Once it's more usable, I'll post a link to it.

[EnTerr]

"lhgrubbs" wrote:
Is it possible to click on a link via the internet that passes the video's URL to my Roku Box and launches the video automatically.

Sure, with some limitations. You can do RokuECP launch of your custom channel with the url as parameter. The limitation is you need to know the Roku box IP and be able to http access it.

Alternative would be when said channel is manually started to check (or while running, periodically poll) intermediary web service for queued items to play.

[lhgrubbs]

As users post media to play on the TV (via the local Roku box from a browser) the format of the content would have to be checked and converted to play. In the best case scenario the active roku channel could do the streaming conversion on the fly from say WMV to MP4. Thus eliminating the lame "Well that didn't work!" experience.

Might this be possible?, in any brightscript utilities?

Or the active roku channel could pass the link back to the back end for validation/conversion then streamed back to the channel/TV on the fly.

Any comments or insights?

[gonzotek]

"lhgrubbs" wrote:
As users post media to play on the TV (via the local Roku box from a browser) the format of the content would have to be checked and converted to play. In the best case scenario the active roku channel could do the streaming conversion on the fly from say WMV to MP4. Thus eliminating the lame "Well that didn't work!" experience.

Might this be possible?, in any brightscript utilities?

Not nearly enough power within the box to do real-time format codec conversions. h.264 has many superior qualities as a codec, but one of the tradeoffs it makes to get high-quality visuals in small(ish) file sizes is that it takes a more powerful cpu (or more time) to do it then other formats. For instance, MPEG2 is fairly cheap (speaking in cpu time/power terms) to encode these days, but you end up with 2-5 times the filesize for similar quality.

[lhgrubbs]

Thank you for your insight on this. Passing the link back to the server for validation and conversion if necessary would seem to be worth trying.