Roku Developer Program

[uxicorp]

Hey Guys,

Finally hacked my app together and it's working. But when I paste my Vimeo Pro file links they expire in 24 hours. How do we use Vimeo with Roku? Or should I get a refund and find some other video host? This has really become an enormous struggle so no wonder there are so few Roku channels.. 😕

[jedashford]

Welcome to the challenge that is Roku. I think "hacked together" describes every Roku channel that ever existed.

All of our movie files expire in hours. Whenever a user requests a video, we dynamically build the url and send it to the device through an API endpoint. If you only have static content, then I'd find somewhere to host your content that wont expire.

[RobSMS]

I'm not sure what links you are getting from Vimeo, but for our free videos we just grab the URL from vimeo.com/9999999/settings/file page and they don't expire. Not the most secure, but it works for free content.

[uxicorp]

OK, i solved this! It's RIDICULOUS that this isn't in the Developer guide.

You just need to take the Vimeo stream url such as: https://player.vimeo.com/external/16521 ... ile_id=169

And replace the & symbol before the profile_id with '&'

https://player.vimeo.com/external/16521 ... ile_id=169

Glad you guys are maintaining 1974 coding standards! Wonderful system you've created.

[TheEndless]

"uxicorp" wrote:
OK, i solved this! It's RIDICULOUS that this isn't in the Developer guide.

You just need to take the Vimeo stream url such as: https://player.vimeo.com/external/16521 ... ile_id=169

And replace the & symbol before the profile_id with '&'

https://player.vimeo.com/external/16521 ... ile_id=169

Glad you guys are maintaining 1974 coding standards! Wonderful system you've created.

Is this in an XML file? If so, that error is yours. & is a reserved character in XML, so it has to be escaped as & (or the entire value needs to be wrapped in a CDATA tag). Here's an article from 15 years ago that explains it: http://www.techrepublic.com/article/bew ... using-xml/
If you're hand editing XML files, then it's a good idea to run them through an XML validator (e.g., http://xmlvalidation.com/) to ensure they're valid before attempting to parse them programmatically.

[belltown]

"uxicorp" wrote:
OK, i solved this! It's RIDICULOUS that this isn't in the Developer guide.

You just need to take the Vimeo stream url such as: https://player.vimeo.com/external/16521 ... ile_id=169

And replace the & symbol before the profile_id with '&'

https://player.vimeo.com/external/16521 ... ile_id=169

Glad you guys are maintaining 1974 coding standards! Wonderful system you've created.

If you are using XML, then how did you even get the thing to parse? If it didn't parse, and you weren't checking the Parse() return code, then that's on you; nothing 'RIDICULOUS' on Roku's part.

And XML is a well-established technology from the late-1990's. I don't see where your '1974 coding standards!' comes from.

There are many deficiencies in the Roku documentation, but not documenting how XML works is not one of them. Here's the relevant documentation: https://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml/ (see section 2.4).

[uxicorp]

I'm not a coder. The ridiculous part is that many users will have to go through trial and error like me until they figure out that they need to use some ancient form of coding to get a URL string to load in XML. What's needed is a dummy's guide that says in English: "Hey, if you use Vimeo" change the & sign to '&' or your XML will not work.

[jedashford]

FYI you dont need to use XML, we do everything in JSON.

[uxicorp]

Really? The VideoPlayer example uses XML. Is there a demo version of that player or something similar using JSON?

[belltown]

"uxicorp" wrote:
Glad you guys are maintaining 1974 coding standards!

"uxicorp" wrote:
many users will have to go through trial and error like me until they figure out that they need to use some ancient form of coding.

"uxicorp" wrote:
Would be so much easier to copy and paste rather than parse through the code and learn it from scratch

"uxicorp" wrote:
I'm not a coder and just want to put ads on my channel. Do you have sample code I can cut and paste?

"uxicorp" wrote:
I'm not a coder.

If you don't want to take the time to learn the platform you're developing on and the technologies you're using, and you just want other people to write your code for you, then fine. But being snarky, and disparaging the Roku development platform over issues that are of your own doing, not Roku's, are not the most productive ways to get help, especially considering that many of the forum helpers here are either Roku employees using their own time to assist developers, or are Roku developers (some with no prior coding experience) who have spent hundreds of hours of their time doing the learning for you, writing the code you want to copy and paste, and acquiring the knowledge they use to help you.