Roku Developer Program

[mikempet]

I've installed VLC Media Player/Server on my Ubuntu server in the hope that I can stream channels on my LAN for Roku 3 channel development. I've searched a variety of topics about VLC in the forums, but I'm having trouble finding a getting started guide that pertains to Roku.

- Can I use VLC to provide streams or VOD files that can be loaded and played using roVideoScreen? I am able to modify and side-load the code.

- How should I configure my stream on the VLC server for streaming?

- Can or should I use announcements to make these streams be visible to channels like the Roku Media Player?

http://www.videolan.org/streaming-features.html

Thanks

[360tv]

I used VLC for quite a while to stream my programming. However I'm trying to move away from it, as it limits my ability to provide dynamic content on the fly.

- Playing long video files as a stream for multiple viewers is good for a while. However, playing out any series of short clips can cause a problem, as there is a break in the stream between each playlist item. For that reason I was forced to render massive blocks of clips in order to provide a smooth stream.

- I used Wowza Media Server on Amazon Web Services to distribute the stream played with VLC -> Media -> Stream. You should either have your video files pre-rendered in the size and bitrate that you plan on your users streaming at, or have VLC transcode the video on the fly which can be processor intensive depending on your settings, or configure Wowza to transcode the incoming stream to the bitrate(s) you require (which I have not learned how to do).

- What?

[mikempet]

I switched to basic Apache HTTP streaming for now, since it allowed me to get content displayed on screen. This may not be a viable long term solution, so I will revisit VLC and look at the Wowza server in the near future. Thanks for the tip.