Roku Developer Program

[samprouda]

Hi, I am a newbie with Roku and I needed your help and guidance in a way to watch a certain online TV channel on Roku. The channel is http://www.alsharqiyatv.com/
This will surely ease homesick and thank you so much in advance.

[bandal]

I would like to do the same on another site, but how to extract the stream they are using?

[RokuJoel]

"samprouda" wrote:
Hi, I am a newbie with Roku and I needed your help and guidance in a way to watch a certain online TV channel on Roku. The channel is http://www.alsharqiyatv.com/
This will surely ease homesick and thank you so much in advance.

They have two iphone compatible links on that page which appear to be at least partially Roku compatible, you could comment out the default video, plop the url's (one at a time) into the SimplevideoPlayer example in the SDK, like this:

urls = ["http://ns8.indexforce.com:1935/home/mystream/playlist.m3u8"]
    qualities = ["SD"]
    streamformat = "hls"
    title = "Live"
    srt=""

and see if they work for you when you hit "Play". 😄

- Joel

[bandal]

So how did you get the url? I want to extract something similar from another site?

[gonzotek]

"bandal" wrote:
So how did you get the url? I want to extract something similar from another site?

I use a user agent spoofer extension for chrome to check if site provides any content in ios/roku friendly formats:
http://spoofer-extension.appspot.com/
After installation I use a mobile safari user agent string:
Mozilla/5.0 (iPad; U; CPU OS 3_2 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/531.21.10 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0.4 Mobile/7B334b Safari/531.21.10

Then I use the chrome developer tools to inspect the video object to determine the video url. Many sites dynamically generate the video tag using javascript, so you can't just look at the source to find it, you have to inspect the live page.

[bandal]

Thanks, but I am using Windows versus the Mac. I will PM you a link to see if it is compatible with Roku.

[gonzotek]

"bandal" wrote:
Thanks, but I am using Windows versus the Mac. I will PM you a link to see if it is compatible with Roku.

Chrome and the user agent spoofer extension are both available for mac or windows, and there are comparable linux tools. I'm on windows myself presently. You need the user agent spoofer to lie to the site and convince it that it's talking to an iOS device; the "like Mac OS X" is just part of the spoofed string.

[TheEndless]

Safari has the iOS user agents built-in. Install Safari for Windows and turn on the Develop menu, then you can select the desired User Agent from the Develop menu.

[bandal]

Cool, I will give it a shot.