Roku Developer Program

[mitchstein]

"destruk" wrote:
Maybe this thread should be moved to the Direct Publisher forum?
https://forums.roku.com/viewforum.php?f=100

IDK if it belongs, that forum seems to be filling up with advertisements and noone is moderating it. And noone seems to respond to anything on it. At least on the generic developers forum there are some developers that will work with you and you do not see spam messages more then support messages.

in the last two days only 3 posts were made there, two are spam, one is asking a serious question, that I do not know the answer to and noone has answered since march 11th...

[bwschulz]

Hello mr mitchstein, again, I add, this is discouraging to say the least and truly destructive in its maximum. At a glance over these pages of unattended intelligent postings of well worded questions or explanations of errors I get that feeling that Direct Publisher has stolen nothing less than Years of cumulative time from these operators while negatively lowering our contributions to the economy by hundreds of thousands of euros to compliment those stolen work years. Is there anywhere else besides the YT wasteland to post professional video series to? I am unaware of any but I once thought, a few short months ago, of how many of our citizens would benefit from what appeared to be a fairly exclusive but relatively accessible platform for secure video broadcast to trusted users on verified devices though that seems faded. the schulz

[mitchstein]

"bwschulz" wrote:
Hello mr mitchstein, again, I add, this is discouraging to say the least and truly destructive in its maximum. At a glance over these pages of unattended intelligent postings of well worded questions or explanations of errors I get that feeling that Direct Publisher has stolen nothing less than Years of cumulative time from these operators while negatively lowering our contributions to the economy by hundreds of thousands of euros to compliment those stolen work years. Is there anywhere else besides the YT wasteland to post professional video series to? I am unaware of any but I once thought, a few short months ago, of how many of our citizens would benefit from what appeared to be a fairly exclusive but relatively accessible platform for secure video broadcast to trusted users on verified devices though that seems faded. the schulz

Well, it is a frustrating experience. BUT in comparison to other companies doing the same thing, it's alot easier here then there. The biggest problem would appear to be documentation and sample codes. I've worked with apple tv, kodi, google, amazon and samsung. This is by far the easiest. It would seem they have a number of bugs on the website that manages the direct player. But eventually you can get past them.
Anyway if you have specific questions, I will do what I can to answer from what I know. It appears there is not nearly as much activity on these forums as there used to be 4 years ago.

[RokuTomC]

Hi mitchstein, just jumping in here with answers/solutions to a few of the remaining open questions in this thread:
1) 15 categories, 40 shows per category 600 unique videos maximum per channel.
—> The limit content limit for Direct Publisher channels is actually 25 rows, 40 content items per row. This comes out to 1,000 unique content items per channel. This can be a little deceiving, though, as series and/or seasons both count as only one content item.

In your case, you'll want to list each season as its own object, and list seasons and episodes as its children. Using this schema, you can include the complete catalogue for 1,000 seasons in a single channel. All of this content will be available in Roku Search (from the home screen) and from the in-channel search feature. Note, though, that the series and season mediaTypes are only supported in JSON feeds: https://github.com/rokudev/feed-specifications/blob/master/direct-publisher-feed-specification.md

2) Channels update in accordance with our feed downloader, which re-downloads the content feed every 4-6 hours. You do not need to resubmit or update your channel. This may beg the question of "what happens if I want a piece of content to go live/be removed at a specific time, and can't rely on the downloader's schedule?" In this case, you'd want to use the validityPeriodStart/validityPeriodEnd fields. Again, these fields are only available for JSON feeds.

[EnTerr]

"mitchstein" wrote:
I have not master the quote and reply method used here yet, so that may be a bit hard to follow.. I'll work on that next time lol..

Let me help - just don't use the cutesy "WYSIWYG" editor - instead when hitting Reply, click on the first icon in the toolbar ("view source") and instead of in the "white" window, type in the "black" one. That way you see the "BBCode" and it's easy to keep formatting right. The "white editor" on the other hand...

[EnTerr]

"mitchstein" wrote:
... There also where chr$(7) which not many would understand today, but it made a nice ringing sound (ding) when it was viewed.. There is no html equivalent that I know of and it was just ignored by the webserver/browsers and the xml didn't crash in the sample roku player on the private channel, but it does crash the json checker.

Crashes json checker? Tell me more!
I just tried chr(7) and Roku JSON parser does not seem to have an issue with that:

Brightscript Debugger> s = """chr(7)=" + chr(7) + """": ? s
"chr(7)=?"

Brightscript Debugger> ss = parseJson(s): ? ss: ? asc(right(ss,1))
chr(7)=?
 7

[Baradanikto]

RokuTomC....

Per your post on the limitations of 25 x 40 for Direct Publisher, what are the implications if those values are exceeded?  Will the DP portal allow that?

[jsonnentag]

"RokuTomC" wrote:
Hi mitchstein, just jumping in here with answers/solutions to a few of the remaining open questions in this thread:
1) 15 categories, 40 shows per category 600 unique videos maximum per channel.
—> The limit content limit for Direct Publisher channels is actually 25 rows, 40 content items per row. This comes out to 1,000 unique content items per channel. This can be a little deceiving, though, as series and/or seasons both count as only one content item.

Is the listed "25 rows" accurate at all?  If so, what is a "row" because every time I try to add more than 15 categories it says to delete something if I want to add something else.  So 15 appears to be the MAXIMUM for "rows" to me.  (???)

I'd like it if the maximum for categories was changed (back) to 25.  Other people would probably appreciate it too. . . .