Roku Developer Program

[ackeba]

Hello all. I'm Aaron I'm pretty brand new to all that is Roku channel development, but I must learn how it all works for work. I'm going to be creating a big channel. like >150 movies, documentaries, and episodes big. I'm wondering what type of server space I would need for this to develop my roku channel, and how much space I might need to be on the safe side? Could I do with any type of server and just a lot of space? or do a need a certain type of server? explain it to me like I'm 5. I estimate every individual video file to be 1 gig or under, or is even that too big for a 90 min movie?

[RokuMarkn]

Space is pretty easy to calculate if you know the bitrate at which your videos are encoded. You would take your bitrate in, say megabits per second, divide by 8 to convert megabits per second to megabytes per second, then multiply by the duration of each video in seconds. So a 90 minute video encoded at 2.6 mbps would require (2.6 / 😎 * 90 * 60 = 1728 megabytes = 1.7 gigabytes.

The other important factor is bandwidth. If you expect to be serving more than a few users at a time, a single server probably won't suffice, and you should look into a CDN solution. You may want to read the sticky post titled "Hosting for video files" in this forum.

--Mark

[ackeba]

Thank you very much for help answering my first question. Now on my continued quest into the unknown world of all that is Roku.... I'm playing around with the simple video script. and I'm trying to get another video to play rather than the initial sample video. Even when I replace the initial example with another one built into the script it doesn't work. Is it because I'm not changing the bitrate info, because when i click play i see the video title then it fails to load and just goes back to the menue? if so what do I have to change about it, and how do I find out the bitrate of different videos.

Also slightly related. If I wanted to stream a youtube video where do I find the root streaming link?

edit: nvm figured it all out.