Roku Developer Program

[luiznicolau]

Hello,

someone who uses vimeo is also having problems that all thumbnails are gone and only the color bar appears?

Tks

[zpinternational]

I am also having this issue? Anyone know what is going on? 

[OddScott]

Vimeo changed their image URL format, but it seems that they didn't bother to notify their customers about it. My best guess is that Vimeo changed the underlying storage architecture for their images, resulting in new URLs. Remapping the old image URLs to the new ones may have been something that they didn't think was worthwhile.

Fortunately Vimeo seems to have loosened up their API rate limits. For example a Pro account now allows 250 API requests per minute. It used to only be 500 per hour. So for many Roku channels it may not be necessary to use URLs for images or streams anymore, so long as the channel can communicate with the Vimeo API.

[bill72]

The reply you posted does not help me as a user of the Vimeo app. As you saw from the screen shot, all the previews are gone. Are you suggesting that all developers will need to remap the old image URLs to the new ones in order to get the previews back?

[OddScott]

Unless Vimeo decides to reactivate their old image URLs, I am only aware of 2 solutions, neither of which is perfect:

1) Obtain new image URLs using Vimeo's API. This might require some programming if you don't have a tool that works with Vimeo's API. The downside of this solution is that Vimeo might eventually invalidate the new URLs, requiring you to fetch yet another set of URLs. The upside is that of the 2 solutions it results in quicker image load times for your channel.

2) Build code to talk to the Vimeo API into your Custom SDK channel. Then it won't matter if Vimeo changes the URLs again, as the API will always return a valid URL. The downside of this solution is that it is not available, as far as I know, for Direct Publisher. It can also slow down your channel if you call the API once for each image instead of calling it for Vimeo Showcases.

I'm not sure if it's possible to scrape image URLs directly from Vimeo's website. This was not an option that last time that I checked.

Apologies for not being clearer earlier.

[slouser]

Hello Scott,

Sorry to bother you. Have you heard if Vimeo is working on a solution to the” thumbnail not showing” problem? It is so frustrating not being able to preview the videos before playing them.

Thank you,

Bill

[OddScott]

You aren't bothering me! But sorry, no, I have not heard anything from Vimeo about reverting back to their old image URL format. If you using Instant TV Channel to build & manage your Roku channel,  the are several tools in it that make working with Vimeo quite easy, including bulk conversion old Vimeo image URLs to new ones.

http://www.instanttvchannel.com/news 

[37mediagroup]

I spent hours redoing my code to map it to the new image url. What's strange is on one smaller channel of about 30 videos they all work now & display the thumbnail. However on my larger channel of about 300 videos only about 10-20 display, the rest still show Color Bars?  Very frustrating. I sent off an email to vimeo support & will keep you all posted, although, I don't have high expectations for resolution.

[37mediagroup]

Never really heard back, but I recoded them manually (about 300 of them).  There's two ways to do it, I was able to follow along these steps for an API GET request (sounds complex, but I'm not great at coding/server knowledge but was able to follow along).   https://vimeo.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/4409973487117-Fixing-Video-Thumbnails-in-Custom-Applicat...

Otherwise, if you set your video to public, and click its shorter public/normal url, you will see a little thumbnail of it plus other videos on the bottom right. Right click it and select 'Open Image In New Tab" and it opens a bigger image of it. Just add    _800x450  to the end of it to resize it as 800x450 or whatever you need (Direct Publisher needs that sizing I believe)

[MattyB]

I'm somewhat surprised this hasn't been fixed as yet, I guess Vimeo doesn't get enough traffic to warrant a prompt resolution.   It's a very poorly designed app to begin with, and this makes it look even more ridiculous.