I have just released a YUI Theater channel for Roku streaming players. The channel is a private channel, meaning that you cannot find it in the channel store on the player, however all you need to do to add the channel is visit the following link:
https://owner.roku.com/add/yui
When you have confirmed that you want to add the channel, go over to your Roku box and go to the Channel Store. When the Channel Store has loaded, exit back to the main channel view and you will see the YUI Theater channel. This will allow you to stream all of the available YUI Theater videos in the comfort of your family room, den, bedroom, or wherever you use your Roku!
This really was an opportunity for me to see what is involved in building a Roku channel. After reading a post on the Yahoo! User Interface Blog about the availability of the videos on the Boxee platform, I had been thinking about doing something similar on Roku. I finally had a few spare hours to play around with it this past weekend, and this is the result.
A little bit of background about Roku channels – underlying the channel is a Brightscript script, which uses an XML feed (served up from a little app running on Google App Engine) containing information about available videos to drive the content that is displayed on-screen. Brightscript is Roku’s scripting language. In some ways it is similar to Javascript, enough for me to pick it up pretty quickly, however there are some differences.
I hope this provides value to those of you who are YUI users. If you have any feedback, please let me know.