I am working on an IPTV system to distribute live satellite TV in a 100 room hotel with Roku as the set-top-box.
My current plan involves connecting the satellite receivers to a HDMI or component capture cards, using VLC and x264 for real-time encoding, and pushing out a RTP or RSTP or UDP H.264 stream to a streaming server. This part is already done.
I am probably going to use Wowza for delivering the streams to the Roku boxes.
My current challenge is the creation of a Roku channel which will enable the browsing of channels (Electronic Program Guide format would be ideal), streaming of these channels from the Wowza server, and basic PVR functionality by saving on the SD card.
Anybody here designed/built such a system before?
Is there a pre-made channel that I can purchase with this functionality?
If there is no off the shelf solution, I welcome PMs with offers ($$$) to create such a channel for me.
The Roku can’t save to the SD card - it is for channel application storage (mainly game channels). You also can’t write to USB with Roku either. There are only about 20 individual private and public channels to stream from Wowza to roku boxes, so you might want to look at a few.
“destruk” wrote:
The Roku can’t save to the SD card - it is for channel application storage (mainly game channels). You also can’t write to USB with Roku either. There are only about 20 individual private and public channels to stream from Wowza to roku boxes, so you might want to look at a few.
The SD card interface is capable of both read and write operations so the Roku can indeed save to the SD card.
Now, are you saying that the channel creation SDK/API does not have support for writing to the SD card? Can anybody else confirm this?
If Channels can’t write to the SD card then Applications surely can, right?
So I might need to use the 3.0 SDK or Roku Native Development Kit. Doesn’t sound like a problem if I hire the right developer.
As for those other channels, none of them have the source code available, do they?
“RokuMarkn” wrote:
Also, Roku does not support any of the video formats you mentioned. HLS is the only live stream format supported.
Wowza will take the RTP stream, encoded in H.264, and format it as HLS for the Roku. The Roku can decode H.264, of course.
This has already been verified working.
“RokuPatrick” wrote:
For a variety of reasons, we don’t recommend Roku for that type of application. Among the reasons:
Player/account management, we’ve neither designed for, nor tested having that many boxes on a single account
Channels are installed on a per account basis. Removing a channel from one Roku player on an account will remove it from all
Content rights. Make sure that any channels you have installed have rights for use in that environment
on the EPG side, be aware of the patent situation around them (specifically grids).
It is possible to install channels without a Roku.com account. That’s how Amazon, Netflix, Hulu and other “primary” channels get there in the first place. I am hoping that Roku is willing to let us know how to do that. If not, there is always the option of setting up 10 Roku.com accounts.
We only intend to install our channel (besides the built-in channels), which we obviously have the rights to use in any environment we wish
The hotel is located in a jurisdiction that does not recognize software patents so patents related to EPG do not present a problem
We only intend to install our channel (besides the built-in channels), which we obviously have the rights to use in any environment we wish
I believe the issue with that is there’s no way to lock down the Rokus, such that anyone can delete your channel or add any other from the Channel Store. This would affect all boxes under that ID, so if one guest of your hotel deletes your channel it’s now gone from all the boxes linked to that box’s account. Basically the Roku guys are already telling you on here that this is not the environment the Roku was developed for and it really isn’t the best fit by far.
“destruk” wrote:
The Roku can’t save to the SD card - it is for channel application storage (mainly game channels). You also can’t write to USB with Roku either. There are only about 20 individual private and public channels to stream from Wowza to roku boxes, so you might want to look at a few.
The SD card interface is capable of both read and write operations so the Roku can indeed save to the SD card.
Now, are you saying that the channel creation SDK/API does not have support for writing to the SD card? Can anybody else confirm this?
If Channels can’t write to the SD card then Applications surely can, right?
So I might need to use the 3.0 SDK or Roku Native Development Kit. Doesn’t sound like a problem if I hire the right developer.
As for those other channels, none of them have the source code available, do they?
The microSD card is only for use in storing channels. It is not accessible through the SDK.
It is possible to install channels without a Roku.com account. That’s how Amazon, Netflix, Hulu and other “primary” channels get there in the first place. I am hoping that Roku is willing to let us know how to do that. If not, there is always the option of setting up 10 Roku.com accounts.
The only way to install a channel without a Roku account is through sideloading a channel as you do during development.
“RokuPatrick” wrote:
The only way to install a channel without a Roku account is through sideloading a channel as you do during development.
That also takes care of your hotel guests not being able to delete the channel, but it still doesn’t stop them from being able to add channels, but maybe that doesn’t matter.
Roku2 can delete dev channels. You click the delete button on the roku’s developer IP, so, it’s also not authenticated to get to that page as it’s in your trusted LAN. Hotel guests with a laptop or cell phone using your internet could log into that site and wipe out your dev channel for each connected roku device on the network, one by one, so that’s not a good solution either.
You could just put the players on their own subnet, authenticated by their mac address and block the mac address from the wireless subnet that the guests are on. Won’t stop people with their own hotspot from tampering, but you could always teach the housekeepers how to reset the box back the way you want it.
We only intend to install our channel (besides the built-in channels), which we obviously have the rights to use in any environment we wish
I believe the issue with that is there’s no way to lock down the Rokus, such that anyone can delete your channel or add any other from the Channel Store. This would affect all boxes under that ID, so if one guest of your hotel deletes your channel it’s now gone from all the boxes linked to that box’s account. Basically the Roku guys are already telling you on here that this is not the environment the Roku was developed for and it really isn’t the best fit by far.
We can reset the Rokus to their “original” state when a guest checks out. It might be even easier than changing the sheets and restocking the mini-bar because it can be done remotely and perhaps automatically.
The Roku was originally designed to only play Netflix. Look how much more first generation Rokus do now with just some software changes.
If this is not what the Roku was originally intended for, it does not mean that it isn’t an excellent solution for this “problem.”
“RokuPatrick” wrote:
The microSD card is only for use in storing channels. It is not accessible through the SDK.
Can game channels write to the micoSD card? If not, where are saved games stored?
The hardware and software are clearly capable of writing to the microSD card. It’s just a question of adding a few commands to the API if they are not already there.
“RokuPatrick” wrote:
The only way to install a channel without a Roku account is through sideloading a channel as you do during development.
That also takes care of your hotel guests not being able to delete the channel, but it still doesn’t stop them from being able to add channels, but maybe that doesn’t matter.
I don’t have any problems with guests adding their own channels. They want to watch their own Netflix or Hulu or Amazon account during their stay? Fine by me.
We’ll reset the Roku when they check out.
Maybe even sell Rokus in the gift shop for those who liked the experience
“destruk” wrote:
Roku2 can delete dev channels. You click the delete button on the roku’s developer IP, so, it’s also not authenticated to get to that page as it’s in your trusted LAN. Hotel guests with a laptop or cell phone using your internet could log into that site and wipe out your dev channel for each connected roku device on the network, one by one, so that’s not a good solution either.
“RokuJoel” wrote:
You could just put the players on their own subnet, authenticated by their mac address and block the mac address from the wireless subnet that the guests are on. Won’t stop people with their own hotspot from tampering, but you could always teach the housekeepers how to reset the box back the way you want it.
Joel is on the right track. There is a very simple way to make it bullet proof.
For a hotel under construction, we can put the Rokus on their own physical LAN, separate from guest Internet access. To prevent somebody very creative from plugging their computer into the dedicated Roku LAN, we can limit access on that switch port to only the Roku’s MAC address (takes under 1 minute of work on a modern commercial network switch). To prevent the 0.1% of people who know how to change their LAN MAC address from doing anything funny, we can enable port isolation on the switch (again, less than a minute of work).
For an existing hotel, or where running two Ethernet cables per room is undesirable, we can simply use a different subnet and VLAN for the guest network.
In the worst case scenario, the guest will be able to, at most, temper with one Roku that they have physical access to, and which we’ll reset when they check out anyway.
Besides, we are talking about a hotel here, not a prison. People checking into hotels have much better things to do than try to damage the hotels property.
There is no way to use the SD for other storage. The SD card is specially formatted to store channels only, and the software which does space management assumes there is nothing else on the card. Besides this, SDK apps have no access to the video stream so DVR functionality would not be possible even if you could write to the card.
