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KE4NYV
Visitor

Displaying a Static Webpage

I first attempted developing a simple channel a couple of years ago when I first bought my Roku, but soon got frustrated and gave up. Now I want to mess with this again and I have a real application I could use it for this time around.

Is there any way to create a simple channel that will simply display a webpage hosted either at a specific URL or IP?

To better explain. I have a weather station that I am currently pulling data from and displaying through a VB.net program I wrote. I want to eventually generate a simple HTML file that will upload to my webserver once a minute. Even though the data is dynamic, the page it'self will be static for the minute that it's there. I want to simply pull that static HTML file from my server and display it on the Roku. Nothing more. The only variable would be grabbing the file locally from the server through the IP address (192.168.0.200) vs a full URL (http://www.somewebsite.com/wx.htm), but that shouldn't really affect it one way or the other.

Any ideas or is this too complicated since the Roku is really meant for streaming video?

Thanks,
Jason
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2 REPLIES 2
RokuChris
Roku Employee
Roku Employee

Re: Displaying a Static Webpage

The SDK doesn't have a web view. The better approach is to have an XML or JSON based API that you can get the necessary data from and then draw the screen using roImageCanvas or roScreen.

http://sdkdocs.roku.com/display/sdkdoc/roImageCanvas
http://sdkdocs.roku.com/display/sdkdoc/roScreen
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KE4NYV
Visitor

Re: Displaying a Static Webpage

Thanks for the suggestions. My limitation is the data is serial from the device. I'll have to figure out the best way to parse this data to an XML format and then upload that to the server.
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