Roku Developer Program

[flailking]

I have been using the sample "video player" to at least get things up and running. My use case is deploying about 150 Rokus for a university's common rooms in dorms. We have the rights to rebroadcast our local OTA channels and have taken care of getting all of them streaming via HLS browser based JS and as stated got the basic working with video player on Roku. My questions are...
1. I don't need any tiers meaning categories, and would like to have the following behavior: Main Screen (Roku Home Page) logo then when launched a list of the various networks available then when it is clicked immediately start the stream. There is no need for program info, run time, ratings etc. I do need a basic description of the channel on the pre-launch page as well as the logo.
2. I also need to have the ability of closed captions. We are embedding it in the HLS transport stream as CEA-708. I built a test with instanttvchannel.com and verified that adding "eia608/1" to the field of TrackIDSubtitle works. But it isn't working in the "video player" example. I guess the CEA and EIA mean the same thing, but 708 is just the digital wrapper for 608. As well as I have no idea of the XML tag for that.
3. I like the ability to have the channel descriptions, logos, stream url, etc in the XML format that "video player" uses.
4. Also, is there anyway to completely lock down the Roku? I know I can lock it down by adding a pin to prevent any download of new channels, but is there a way to prevent the deletion of any channels or change any system settings? The only other channel that is going to be on there is SlingTv. Is there anyway to lock any changes to that as well or is that something that would have to be up to Sling and their channel to create?
5. Does anyone know of how many Rokus can be on one account? I plan to publish as a private channel. We would just like to have 1 account to control them all.
6. I would like any XML/images to be local on the Roku, that way if there is a chance the webserver took a crap they still could access the streams. I found the following code to allow the catagories.xml to be local.Any updates would be published to the private channel stream.

rsp = ReadAsciiFile(http.Http.GetUrl())

Any help would be awesome!

[belltown]

No, you can't lock down a Roku to avoid deleting channels or changing system settings.

As far as how many Rokus you can have on one account is concerned, the question has been asked before, but no clear answer given by Roku:

http://forums.roku.com/viewtopic.php?f=34&t=41379
http://forums.roku.com/viewtopic.php?f=28&t=63189

I doubt there's a theoretical limit. The practical limit would probably depend on how well-designed the Roku back-end is.

However, from the Sling TV - Terms of Use:

You may use more than one Permitted Device, but the number of Authorized User(s) concurrently accessing or using our Services may be limited to one (1) Permitted Device at any time

The requirements you list for your private channel all seem fairly straightforward. Use an roPosterScreen or roListScreen to display your channel list. Typically, Roku video channels use an roSpringboardScreen to display the channel details and a Play button, etc, which you say you don't need. I don't see any problem bypassing the roSpringboardScreen and going directly to an roVideoScreen when the user selects a particular live channel stream to play.

[flailking]

Don't worry, we are committed to paying a subscription fee per Roku for SlingTv. Is there an example that you can provide that would show the simple roPosterScreen or roListScreen to steer me in the right direction? Is there a .brs file that can incompass the whole thing or would I need more? Not the best coder, and learning on the fly so to speak. Which actual .brs file needs to be edited? Would the roPosterScreen allow me to use the XML to inject the channels needed? Also still need advice on the closed captioning if possible. I know I am asking a lot for free, but just would like a point on the right direction and hoping that I can get it rolling.

It is a shame that Roku doesn't have a true lockdown feature. Is there anyone @ Roku to email to at least explore this feature? It seems hotels or other hospitality environments would like this. Our environment needs it, you know those crazy college kids...lol. They will try and hack everything. We have a very outdated cable TV infrastructure that can't even support HD, hence we are looking at TV over our IP network. It would cost millions to upgrade our coax to support HD and of course Comcast is involved and we all know what we think of them. I can't wait 'till that contract expires!

EDIT: Is there an easy way to port this to AppleTV or Amazon Fire or Chromecast? Or is that a whole new bag of shit?

Thanks,
Flailking

[floam]

Frankly if I were trying to implement this I would probably be trying to make something work over DLNA - transcoding if necessary - if it isn't the case a bunch of HDTVs are already purchased and they lack ethernet ports.