ROKU - VIMEO video hosting

Question

I've tried to work this out, however, I'm at a stage now where I need to ask for advise/help.

I'm developing a ROKU channel (to showcase clips/trailers/promos) for my Vimeo channel.

I'm using the hero grid theme (which ROKU kindly give away on their GitHub channel), and according to VIMEO the videos should work.

Well, the videos do work, for a while. I have the VIMEO Pro account and they inform me that with this membership I can share files where the token won't make the videos last only 4 hours. I've emailed them back and forth and, to be honest, they have been helpful, but unfortunately the files will not work.

Other people (according to documents/sites online), have managed to get this working, so, it is achievable, but when I put the links (without the tokens) and with the player URL, the app crashes on load up.

I'm not a coder, however I do like trying to code based on pre-existing examples and digging around, however, this has really got me stumped.

So, in short, I'm:

1. Creating a ROKU channel
2. I'm using the hero grid channel code that ROKU give away on their GitHub account (https://github.com/rokudev/hero-grid-channel)
3. I have a VIMEO Pro account which should let me create links that don't time out after 4 hours)
4. The BrightScript code .xml is looking at .RSS feeds on my web server
5. Everything is looking correct but does work

I'm more than happy to share the code if anyone can shed some light on this (I'm not at my desktop just yet but can send in the morning).

I'm really hoping someone can help :-)

Cheers Chris

Answer 1

Chris, to determine if it is the app crashing your channel or VIMEO Pro try placing one of your videos on your web server. Point your xml file to it and try it. If it still does not play, then most likely something in the way you encoded your video could be the problem.

Roku is very picky about the kind of videos it plays. Typically encoding to mp4, m4v is a safe bet.

The next thing to try if it works fine is use the same link in the xml file you are using for your VIMEO video and paste it into a web browser to make sure it plays fine.

Finally, one other thing to check is visit your xml file by putting in the address into a web browser using Chrome. Once the file loads it will tell you if it is valid and there are no errors. You would be surprised how easy it is to crash a Roku channel by one small typo in a xml file.

Answer 2

Chris, I believe you are experiencing what I may have experienced before. If you are using an external XML document to populate your list and URLs for your videos as my template required me to. You need to modify the link Vimeo gives you because they use an Ampersand (&) in their URL.

This Ampersand get's stripped when thrown into the Roku application causing the video to crash. Replace & with & and your videos should work and each instance they press play it creates the temporary key for viewing.

Here's some example code: This is the normal link with the Ampersand.

    https://player.vimeo.com/external/213601353.hd.mp4?s=71a24afbe4d4792806a08391263kjhisihe69fe2&profile_id=xxx

Change it to this, modifying the Ampersand near where the profile_id is located.

    https://player.vimeo.com/external/213601353.hd.mp4?s=71a24afbe4d4792806a08391263kjhisihe69fe2&profile_id=xxx

See if that works.