Roku Developer Program

[melkat]

We're creating a channel that will primarily stream videos on-demand, so we're using the videoplayer example as our primary template. However, I'd like to add a link to our live stream from the first screen that appears. Currently, the first screen shows the contents of the category.xml feed. How would I add an image/link on that screen that, when clicked, goes directly to our live stream, as follows:

Live Stream | Category A (from categories.xml) | Category B (from categories.xml)

Selecting the Live Stream would automatically play the live stream. Selecting one of the categories would show the function as it currently does in the videoplayer example, by showing the "categoryLeaf" elements and their corresponding xml feeds.

As you can probably tell, I'm very new at this, so please let me know if there's any other information I can provide.

Thanks,

M

[RokuJoel]

Haven't tested this, but I think if you replace this:

<streamFormat>mp4</streamFormat>
		<media>
			<streamQuality>SD</streamQuality>
			<streamBitrate>1500</streamBitrate>
			<streamUrl>http://video.ted.com/talks/podcast/SethGodin_2003_480.mp4</streamUrl>
		</media>
	

with this:

<streamFormat>hls</streamFormat>
		<media>
			        <streamQuality>SD</streamQuality>
			        <streamBitrate>500</streamBitrate>
			        <streamUrl>http://devimages.apple.com/iphone/samples/bipbop/bipbopall.m3u8</streamUrl>
		</media>
		

Might do the job. Set the bitrate to the lowest bitrate of a multibitrate stream, or the bitrate of a single bitrate stream, if you set 0 as your bitrate, it will take a longer time to buffer and stream.

- Joel

[melkat]

Hi Joel,

Yes, that would work, but I was hoping to bypass the click-throughs to get to that point. As it is now, a user has to click once to select Live Stream, then again, on the "kid" element for Live Stream, the again by clicking "Play" on the details screen. Ideally, I would like a user to click the first Live Stream button on the first page and immediately launch the live stream.

Any ideas?

Thanks!

[RokuChris]

"melkat" wrote:
Yes, that would work, but I was hoping to bypass the click-throughs to get to that point. As it is now, a user has to click once to select Live Stream, then again, on the "kid" element for Live Stream, the again by clicking "Play" on the details screen. Ideally, I would like a user to click the first Live Stream button on the first page and immediately launch the live stream.

You could leverage the specialCategory logic in the sample channel. Most of that code lives in categoryFeed.brs and appHomeScreen.brs. There might be a few other tweaks needed, but basically you'd add the code for playing your live stream to displaySpecialCategoryScreen() then add a specialCategory element to your XML for your live stream.