Roku Developer Program

[dewknight]

Hello all,

I'm doing a lot of research right now, but I figured that I would post here in case I am searching for the wrong things.

I am looking to start a 24/7 stream of various videos. The videos are all either mine, or licensed properly. I want to schedule the files to play in a certain order, at certain times.

What I think I need is:

Storage for the files (S3 or cloudfront?)
streaming server (HLS?) that uses those files
Scheduling software to run on the streaming server, or my computer.

I plan to make this a channel on roku, as well as just a regular flash stream.

If anybody has some advice or all of this, I would welcome it. So far, I think that cloudfront is what I want to use. The biggest thing that I'm unsure of is the scheduling. I've looked at mltframework. I think it almost does what I need. I plan to install it on a VM to test it out.

Thank you for any assistance! I'll continue to search the forums for information/

[RokuJoel]

Since this is VOD, you could just use Amazon (or whatever brand) cloud storage and some kind of scheduling system, which could be as simple as an xml file with a list of videos (and supporting information - bitrates, dimensions, descriptions, etc) to play and times to play them, the format could be progressive mp4 or HLS (where the segments are all pre-created and stored online with playlist files).

Realtime transcoding and HLS streaming servers like Wowza for Amazon or Adobe Flash Media Server for Amazon generally becomes necessary if you want to run live streams, or use video formats that are not directly Roku compatible and transcode them on-the-fly.

- Joel

[dewknight]

Excellent, thank you for the information. I'll definitely look at setting up an xml file for the scheduling. I'm still going through the roku documentation, but I assume there is information about formats in it.

Do you know of any scheduling software that can put out a compatible playlist?

[RokuJoel]

No, but I'm sure something exists, otherwise, you could put something together with PHP or your scripting language of choice that allows you to enter a time for each video and output an xml file.

You could even hand-code it into a text file.

- Joel