Roku Developer Program

[ironbill]

Hello World,

My name is Bill Daly (a.k.a. iRoNBiLL) and I work with Team Navi-X on a project known as Navi-X or the Navi-X Media Browser. Essentially, our application is a content aggregator for multiple platforms, currently including Boxee, XBMC and WiiMC. We are currently compatible on any platform you can install Boxee or XBMC on to, including Apple TV 2, iPhone 4 and iPads.

Doesn’t Roku Already Have Channels That Bring In Internet Content??
Yes… but we are a bit different. We are a collaborated effort of about a quarter million users who contribute links to “playlists” for browsing and playback from sources found within Navi-X. This means anyone using Navi-X can share content with other Navi-X users as well as browse and find content linked to by other users.

What Kind Of Content Can I Find In Navi-X?
Almost anything. Video, audio, pictures, podcasts, text, web pages with content, live streams, XML feeds, site scrapers… it’s almost overwhelming the amount and type of multimedia content that can be found in Navi-X. I will leave our description at that for now… if you want to check out more, go to http://www.navi-x.org for a thorough explanation of what Navi-X is, as well as screenshots and a video demo to check out. You can also find out more about Navi-X via Google and Twitter.

The reason I am here today is to reach out to the Roku community in search of someone who would be interested in porting over our app/channel to the Roku platform. We are an open-source project and as such, we depend on the contributions of users and developers to help make porting to other platforms happen.
Here is some current usage stats for Navi-X… We currently average about 7 million hits a month, have over 7000 users a day using Navi-X and we serve about 90 GB of just text-playlist data a month. We have approximately 245,000 users who use Navi-X either a little bit or a lot.

With this in mind, you definitely wouldn’t be wasting your time porting something over like this… your work will definitely get seen by people, so we are hoping for a seasoned veteran of Roku development to step forward to help with the cause. Unfortunately, since we don’t make a penny at this time for Navi-X, we cannot pay a developer to do this work… we are soley depending on an open-source developer familiar with this arena. If you feel you could use a spot on a project that is incredibly popular with folks, this is it! Please reach out to me at xiRoNBiLLx@gmail.com if any Roku developers are interested in becoming the “Head Developer for Navi-X on Roku”… we hope to hear from you soon!

Warm Regards,

iRoNBiLL

[ironbill]

By the way Roku moderators... your search function for the forums does not appear to be working... I tried the search term "Navi-X" and your search doesn't even pull up this thread. Just a heads up... thanks.

iRoNBiLL

[RyanMarquiste]

I believe the problem here is with the hyphen character. It is a special character that tells the search not to include posts that contain the words that follow it.

Try searching on just "Navi" and your post should come up.

[ironbill]

Thanks. Wouldn't that be more of an error to report to the site admin than providing a publicly unknown workaround? Whatever works... thanks.

iRoNBiLL

[renojim]

All these forums (on the Internet) pretty much use the same package, or one of a couple, and they all have pretty poor search capabilities. You'd really want to report it to whoever or whatever is responsible for phpBB, but I'm sure it's a known issue.

If you really want to search the forum with a better search engine, try a Google search like this:
site:forums.roku.com "navi-x"

-JT

[ironbill]

Fair enough. PhpBB has always had quirks so I can live with it. If any of you guys responding to this thread could recommend someone who may be interested in helping us port Navi-X to Roku, please let me know! Thanks.

iRoNBiLL

[jbrave]

Most people won't spend two months of their life writing a complex application for free, but perhaps someone who is just learning Brightscript who has other coding experience will want to take it on and do the port as an educational experience.

Otherwise, expect to pay a few thousand dollars to hire someone. It looks like a very ambitious project, so I would bid this one pretty high if it was a paid gig.

I'm not even sure what you are trying to do is 100% possible on Roku (or legal for that matter, you'll note that the private YouTube channel is no longer available for install on Roku, for legal reasons) unless you are trans-coding all these video types on the fly to h.264.

Still, perhaps you should talk directly to Roku, they might find the project interesting enough to do it themselves for free.

- Joel

[kbenson]

"jbrave" wrote:
...or legal for that matter, you'll note that the private YouTube channel is no longer available for install on Roku, for legal reasons...

I actually interpreted it more as a sign that an officialYoutube channel may be coming, seeing as it came right after Youtube announced paid movie delivery, and Roku mentioned they got the C&D during/after negotiations...

[ironbill]

Well I have noticed in other forums where Roku users are begging to have Navi-X ported to Roku... in fact, people debating IPTV products like Roku, GoogleTV and Boxee Box... if you read much of their responses, they claim they won't even buy a product that does not support Navi-X on it. It's not like we are some sort of de-generate app... people love our app. The fact is our app is not as complex as people make it out to be. We have been around for 4+ years and nobody has shut us down or even sent us a cease order... probably because it's not illegal to share links to things on the internet. Hosting is another conversation all together. (based on DMCA-information services definition)

The Navi-X app for XBMC is 850kb and on Boxee it's like 2 megs... it's all python script currently, not even compiled source. Why someone would get paid for converting code is understandable, but we did pickup 3 other devs who are working for free on porting us to the other platforms... are Roku devs just in it for the money?! That my be a problem for Roku I would think but I don't know.

If nothing else jbrave, maybe you could please help me by pointing me to a contact at Roku I could reach out to and inquire about this. This would be much appreciated as all dev links point here. Thanks in advance!

iRoNBiLL

[davidg7864]

Navi-X on XBMC is way cool, been building an HTPC to supplement Roku and installed XBMC and Navi-X and it is amazing how much content is available. Navi-X on Roku would be a great channel.