Roku Developer Program

[gonzotek]

"RokuJoel" wrote:

"migmigmig" wrote:
I'm using the basic "video player" sample code as the basis for my Roku application.

I've expanded the included "categories.xml" from that sample code into "application.xml" and included the ability to specify the entirety of the theme object, the styles of the poster screens, default images if the feed has no images, cooked attributes to be able to specify feeds with params rather than urls, etc, in that xml file.

In the manifest file, I added an extra key for the url to that XML so it can be loaded from the internet as in the original example or directly from the package, depending upon the needs of my customer service teams who will use the eventual framework to create turnkey Roku (and multiple other set-top-box) applications for our customers.

I use the manifest file because it's the one file I will always know where to find. Conceivably, I could have put all of my application configuration variables in the manifest file, but the XML format is more advantageous for complex configuration than a simple ini-style key-value set, so I just use it to configure the url to the real configuration.

Do yourself and us a favor and don't use the manifest file for anything other than the keys that we have listed for your use, we don't need to see any weird behavior caused by unusual items in the Manifest file, and have to spend hours tracking down why your channel fails in some unexpected way.

There is no reason why you can't create your own file that is "always in the same place". Further, I would suggest setting up your channels to check the internet by default for the xml and if there is no response, fail over to the local xml file. That way, you can control what happens remotely.

- Joel

Mig's post is almost a year and a half old, it just got bumped today, just fyi. He's a former winamp developer and definitely knows his stuff(he gave me some great coding advice about 10 years ago when I was writing scripts for winamp3/5 skins 🙂 ).

Also, it'd probably be a very good idea to put the 'no unusual items' directive into the documentation(http://sdkdocs.roku.com/display/RokuSDK ... ifest+File). And taking it a step further, even make compilation fail or at least give warnings in the debugger if unexpected values do show up in the manifest.