Roku Direct Publisher

[mitchstein]

great idea. i never thought of doing that...

[jzachary]

It feels a little wonky but it’s better than running your stream constantly on a loop. 

You can link to an on demand hls file as well to run a loop if you wanted. I might add that later on.

[WOLTV]

This sounds great. We only have live shows at the end of each week and have to pay as we go for the HLS m3u8.... 

How can we link to a VOD file and have the live stream show it as active? 

Right now, since ROKU only updates about every 6 hours we have to make the link live 6 to 12 hours a head of time but sometimes it does not take it .. even if the preview does... wont show live.  Would love to have something that could be active 24/7 without being a live stream until we are ready

[jzachary]

From what I can tell, roku isn’t checking if the m3u8 file linked too is valid, just if it exists. 

I created just blank file on my server called blank.m3u8

my feed references a different url, that url is set on my server to 302 redirect to the blank file. When roku runs my feed it sees the file and is happy. Otherwise if I link my live m3u8 it throws a file not found error because my live file doesn’t exist until I stream (Castr.io)

so when I’m actually live my redirect changes from the blank file to the actual one.

in my channel my live item shows up and if you try to view it just bounces back to Home Screen, and when I’m live it plays the content. The redirect works great, it doesn’t cache it apparently.

so you can also direct to an actual m3u8 file instead if the blank for offline. I use UCDN for that to have my on demand loop file.