Roku Developer Program

[xavier]

Hi folks,

I was under the impression that BookmarkPosition allows us to rewind to a position prior to position defined in BookmarkPosition. That does not seem to work and BookmarkPosition behaves just like Playstart.
Any idea what to use to start a video at a given position but still allow user to rewind or start from beginning ? I have tried to use play follow by a seek but with no luck...

[destruk]

Your question is a little confusing.  When using PlayStart  and you have it set to a value other than 0, the video starts playing from that specified second value in the video.  Pressing left or right on the remote during playback tosses up a bif file or a position bar and you can scroll to any point forward or back in the video to resume play.  To start from the beginning you'd set PlayStart to 0 or BookmarkPosition to 0/null before starting playback.  It's easier to have a Play from beginning button to do that.  When using the custom video player these base features might be disabled.

[xavier]

Hi destruk...
Here is info as per ROKU SDK documentation found at link : https://sdkdocs.roku.com/display/sdkdoc/Content+Meta-Data
PlayStart defines the start position of the content, in seconds. The player is not allowed to move to a position prior to this point. Any seek operation prior to this point will be clipped to PlayStart.
And this is working just fine....

BookmarkPostion definition is slightly different :[/font][/color]
Users are allowed to seek to positions prior to BookmarkPostion in the content.[/font][/color]
BookmarkPostion...[/font][/color]

[destruk]

I think that page of the documentation is wrong.
If I set PlayStart, and then use the roVideoPlayer it buffers to that point and starts playing, and then if I press left on the remote it allows me to go back in time towards the beginning.  I can start playing from anywhere.  That's how it's always worked for me with video in this case.  Probably it's getting confused if you have both set.  Try setting BookmarkPosition=null before adding the content to the videoplayer.

[destruk]

BTW - another stupid bug in the Roku firmware -
If you set playstart to a value and also use PlayDuration for roVideoScreen - it doesn't work as expected.  I haven't tested it with roVideoPlayer simply because I didn't want users to be able to rewinding or view more than 2 minutes this way.
ie -
PlayStart=300 '5 minutes
PlayDuration=120 '2 minutes

This should play from minutes 5-7 of the video but it doesn't - it loads then stops playback and returns to the springboard screen.
If you set PlayStart to 300 for 5 minutes and then PlayDuration to 420 for 7 minutes then it works to play minutes 5-7.

[xavier]

Hi, Thanks for feedback !