Packaging off device

Archived
1

We need a way to package “channels” that doesn’t involve doing it from the Roku device. Is this possible?

2

While I have strong doubts that this is a possibility, can you PM me a use-case?

  • Joel
3

Page 8 of the Channel Packaging and Publishing Guidelines (in beta 3.0 sdk) says:

There are a few simple steps required to package your application before uploading to the Roku Channel Store. This process creates a secure version of your application suitable for general release. The packaging process uses cryptographic hardware on the player during the process, so it requires you to have a player set up for development access.So unless you can duplicate the functionality of the crypto chip, I don’t think it’s possible. I’m curious as to the use case as well, but I understand if you don’t want to discuss it publicly.

4

It occurs to me (completely unverified however) that you might be able to use cURL and do your packaging on the device, using an HTTP post from a bash script.
That way, if you want to do some “assembly line” style packaging of channels, you just need a few devices and your script could queue them up and batch-job package them, en masse.

  • Joel
5

“RokuJoel” wrote:
It occurs to me (completely unverified however) that you might be able to use cURL and do your packaging on the device, using an HTTP post from a bash script.
That way, if you want to do some “assembly line” style packaging of channels, you just need a few devices and your script could queue them up and batch-job package them, en masse.

  • Joel
    Definitely possible. I have both a Windows batch file and a Makefile that will do this, including re-keying the box before packaging. Unfortunately, they’re both pretty specific to my dev environment, and they don’t yet work with the Roku 2 (because they changed the packaging page), but the basic curl command to do the packaging looks like this, replacing the %variables% with the appropriate values:
curl -s -S -F "mysubmit=Package" -F "passwd=%key%" -F "app_name=%appName%" -F "pkg_time=%epoch%" http://%ip%/plugin_package

Downloading the package automatically is a bit more involved and requires parsing the resultant HTML from the above command. If you need to do this regularly, it may be worth investing in writing a little app to do it that will give you a bit more control than make/bat. Either way, all three methods require a physical Roku to use, which it sounds like isn’t an option in this case, for some reason.