Roku Developer Program

[pjsteele]

Will the new SDK allow us to write to the USB drive?

That could save us a ton of bandwidth. Plus, avoid the need for a sneaker-net.

[Robert99]

I don't know what ROKU did with their USB support. However, as an end user, I would be somewhat concerned if ROKU gave open access so channels could write/delete any file on the USB disk. I can see the benefit to having additional "buffer space", however I would prefer it if the channels don't have the ability to overwrite and/or delete data I may already have on the USB disk (so if ROKU does give USB write ability, I hope they limit it so that a channel can only write and/or delete its own files, and not alter any other files).

NOTE: Just because we don't have a "rogue channel" yet (at least that I'm aware of), doesn't mean that some malware writer won't come up with some "trojan horse" channel at some point in the future. And it would be a royal headache, if some channel starts deleting (or worse yet, replacing with SPAM files) data files on the USB disk. And even if you aren't talking about a malware writer putting SPAM on your USB, you still could have a legit channel with a bug in it, that causes files to be lost and/or corrupted (again, assuming that unlimited write to the USB disk is allowed by the channel API).

Now granted, as a precaution, I'll (personally) probably make a point of using a USB disk dedicated to just storing media I may want to play on the ROKU. And I'll probably have a "backup" of that media on some other disk (not attached to the ROKU), so I should be able to recover if/when some ROKU channel corrupts the USB disk's data. But I still would prefer it if a channel didn't have the option to corrupt (overwrite or delete) that data (on the USB disk) in the first place!

[bbefilms]

I suspect that the capability to download Netflix content to a USB would be very popular 🙂

[pjsteele]

One possible resolution (not a 100% fix of course) is to introduce code signing. If the channel is not signed it would not have write permissions.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_signing

[RokuKevin]

Yes, we will have the ability to write to some USB drives. Our USB support will include Read/Write support for VFAT and NTFS filesystems. HFS and HFSPlus filesystems are supported in Read Only mode only.

It will not be possible to download Netflix content to the USB. The content played by the video player is not directly accessible to script writers. The Netflix content is also protected from direct download without proper credentials.

It is up to each developer to protect their own content from downloading without proper authentication. Please see Section 4.25 of the component reference doc for a writeup on mutual authentication SSL and the x-roku-reserved-dev-id.

--Kevin

[david_cooper]

Hello Kevin, forgive me if I should know from somewhere else but I am wondering what the timeline is for the api to read/write to usb storage?

[RokuKevin]

You can already do that!

Please check out Section 3.1 and Section 5.7 of the Component Reference.

--Kevin

[Anonymous]

"david.cooper" wrote:
Hello Kevin, forgive me if I should know from somewhere else but I am wondering what the timeline is for the api to read/write to usb storage?

It is in the current SDK.

[ooshwa]

I am not able to write a file to the USB drive. For example:

req = CreateObject("roUrlTransfer")
req.SetUrl("http://domain.com/test.txt")
print req.AsyncGetToFile("ext1:/test.txt")
print req.GetFailureReason()

returns

false
Read-only file system

My drive is not write-protected, and I've tried it with both FAT32 and NTFS.

Software: v2.9, build 1553
Hardware: N1101

Any ideas? Thanks for the help.

[ooshwa]

Anyone?

Has anybody ever successfully written to a USB drive?