Roku Direct Publisher

[37mediagroup]

A bit against the grain in this section, but I feel we've all spent so much time discussing DP, Roku's technologies & difficulties etc, and have all sorta gotten to know each other a bit, however we never had the chance to get to know one another aside from the standard Q&A setup we have here. So I thought I'd open a bit of a thread seeing each of our thoughts & opinions of the Roku devices outside of technology & advertising.

Essentially, I'm wondering everyone's thoughts on Roku's as a whole. Are you a user? A fan? Or is it just another device to you like Chromecast & Firesticks. Do you hate it & only have a channel to fulfill the void of customers who use it.

Personally, I like them. A fan. I cut the cord in 2010 & checked out Roku on a whim, was impressed. Funny, I thought they were 'popular' way back then, and thought I was late to the game. I do a bit of web design and wanted to try a channel years ago using their old Brightscript. Someone had a video explaining it, but updates & coding changes it was already outdated a year or two later. I stopped trying but came across the DP method in winter of 2017, and while it was a bit of a challenge for me, I completed it. I'm not a massive coder, but DP's template foundation reminds me of Wordpress installs.

Anyway I like them. I've never checked out others like Fire or Chromecast, would like to. A friend/neighbor has one but doesn't seem as high on it, and my brother has a smart TV but those get antiquated quick & I think Roku's method of pushing their software into Smart TVs is the way it'll go.

Trying to avoid many 'complaints' about the programming side of it, (or advertising). Just wondering what alot of your stories are as to why you created a channel, and your thoughts on Roku vs others in the market. (Does anyone mostly use another device at home?) or if you've built your channel on other devices. (I gotta check out Baradanitko's Fire TV convsersion program, seems a good starting point. And no, I haven't built on any others, checked into Amazons. Seems they tried to make a somewhat simple creator but wasn't nearly as close as DP imho. Never used or seen any others either)

[mitchstein]

I started out with Roku several years ago long before DP existed. Never was able to get my channels published and really just used the demo brightscript and added my content to it. As far as the others, they didn't come close to making developing easy.. When Roku released the DP, it made it even easier, at least for people with limited amount of content. I am just now publishing my fourth public DP channel. Simply because not much fits in the DP, and I can not for thel ife of me get the "series" format to work, so each vintage tv series becomes it's own channel.. LOL

I have about 4-6 more channels to publish but am spacing out the publishing as to get them into the spotlight over time as opposed to all at once. Kinda like free advertising..

Anyway, I have tried to develop for kodi, amazon fire and several other generic android based boxes. But with the amount of learning another coding language and another set of poorly explained directions the fact that Roku has a much larger audience then any of them others I have just stuck here with Roku.

As a user I love my Rokus, I have one in the bedroom, one in my office and a roku tv in my livingroom. I also own a fire tv and one of those dangles from google.. I used them a couple times and use my Roku all the time... About 4-5 years now it's been roku even more so then the cable boxes...

Of course I am not a HD infatuated person, I love vintage SD TV, and most of my original productions are still in SD. It doesn't seem to effect my audience at all, we have over 1 million active users between Roku and the web site, 2750+ videos and we run the servers ourselves, server 2012 r2 (just upgraded last week from server 2008 r2... I've been streaming video through the web since 1992, of course back then only a few users had enough bandwidth to watch our stuff, lol. And before 1992 we ran a very popular BBS that was almost purchased by AOL, but I didn't like the price they offered and really enjoyed being a SYSOP...

[Baradanikto]

Mitchstein...I published a sample of a series that works in a previous post. Also, the software I wrote can build a series without issues. Additionally, I've also written software to convert a Roku channel to a FireTv channel compatible with Amazon Creator.

[mitchstein]

I will have to check it all out...
I've been away for about 4 months or so from doing anything with roku and just spent the last 2 weeks upgrading all the servers...

[mitchstein]

Ok, just checked it out, I was working on the samething at the sametime and the posts are replies to my posts.. lol..

If you remember I checked out your software, and it is great software except for me to enter 2750+ videos one at a time typed in was a bit too much for me.. we had talked about scripting something that could read a database file or the old xml files from the old player.. or even just imprting a comma delimited file.. anything to automate the process..

[mitchstein]

Also, I did get a json series file to import with the correct number of items, but I couldn't get it to display anything in the channel, nothing showed up in categories to pick from. When I posted it on partners site with roku I was told there was a bug in DP and they would let me know when it was fixed.. never heard anything.. lol..

[Baradanikto]

The MRSS feed manager software can import a CSV file now. The next release of the Json feed manager will support CSV and possibly more.

[mitchstein]

I tried the json to rss software and it keeps getting an error invalid datetime so it just stops.. I was trying to parse a working roku json file..
But no problems, I am working on an asp script to just read from my database and write the rss feed for me.. So far so good..

[Baradanikto]

mitchstein: Can you post the log file that's created so I can take a look at the error?  It's in the Documents folder under the product name.  And, if possible, please include the feed file you are trying to convert.

[mitchstein]

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
                   <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
                   <head>
                   <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
                   <title>Roku2FireTV Converter 2018 1.0.0.0 Crash Report</title>
                   <style type="text/css">
                   .message {
                   padding-top:5px;
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                   font-family:Sans-serif;
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                   border-style:dashed;
                   border-width:1px;
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                   padding-top:1px;
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                   font-family:Arial;
                   }
                   </style>
                   </head>
                   <body>
                   <div class="title" style="background-color: #FFCC99">
                   <h2>Roku2FireTV Converter 2018 1.0.0.0 Crash Report</h2>
                   </div>
                   <br/>
                   <div class="content">
                   <div class="title" style="background-color: #66CCFF;">
                   <h3>Windows Version</h3>
                   </div>
                   <div class="message">
                   <p>Microsoft Windows 10 Home 64-bit (OS Build 17134)</p>
                   </div>
                   </div>
                   <br/>
                   <div class="content">
                   <div class="title" style="background-color: #66CCFF;">
                   <h3>CLR Version</h3>
                   </div>
                   <div class="message">
                   <p>4.0.30319.42000</p>
                   </div>
                   </div>
                   <br/>    
                   <div class="content">
                   <div class="title" style="background-color: #66CCFF;">
                   <h3>Exception</h3>
                   </div>
                   <div class="message">
                   <br/>
                       <div class="content">
                       <div class="title" style="background-color: #66CCFF;">
                       <h3>Exception Type</h3>
                       </div>
                       <div class="message">
                       <p>System.FormatException</p>
                       </div>
                       </div><br/>
                       <div class="content">
                       <div class="title" style="background-color: #66CCFF;">
                       <h3>Error Message</h3>
                       </div>
                       <div class="message">
                       <p>String was not recognized as a valid DateTime.</p>
                       </div>
                       </div><br/>
                       <div class="content">
                       <div class="title" style="background-color: #66CCFF;">
                       <h3>Source</h3>
                       </div>
                       <div class="message">
                       <p>mscorlib</p>
                       </div>
                       </div><br/>
                       <div class="content">
                       <div class="title" style="background-color: #66CCFF;">
                       <h3>Stack Trace</h3>
                       </div>
                       <div class="message">
                       <p>   at System.DateTimeParse.Parse(String s, DateTimeFormatInfo dtfi, DateTimeStyles styles)<br/>   at Roku2FireTVConverter.BaseForm.ConvertFromJson(XmlElement rssElement, XmlElement channelElement)<br/>   at Roku2FireTVConverter.BaseForm.backgroundWorker_DoWork(Object sender, DoWorkEventArgs e)<br/>   at System.ComponentModel.BackgroundWorker.OnDoWork(DoWorkEventArgs e)<br/>   at System.ComponentModel.BackgroundWorker.WorkerThreadStart(Object argument)</p>
                       </div>
                       </div><br/>
                   </div>
                   </div><br/>
                           <div class="content">
                           <div class="title" style="background-color: #66FF99;">
                           <h3>Developer Message</h3>
                           </div>
                           <div class="message">
                           <p>Crash Report for rrirower</p>
                           </div>
                           </div></body></html>

"Baradanikto" wrote:
mitchstein: Can you post the log file that's created so I can take a look at the error?  It's in the Documents folder under the product name.  And, if possible, please include the feed file you are trying to convert.