I’ve had a Roku streaming player for my TV for a few years now and a few months ago I got interested in how it actually worked. I started seeing more channels pop-up and I thought how hard could it be to put one up? So I found their SDK, grabbed their sample application and after a few tweaks, some nice artwork and finding content, it was approved.
Why go through the trouble of doing this to watch videos on my TV when I can just watch them on the laptop? One word… Distraction.
If a video is more than 3 to 5 minutes long, there is a good chance I won’t make it all the way through. It’s hard to sit still when you have the full power of your laptop and the internet at your fingertips. On the TV, as long as there are no commercials, I’m pretty much going to just sit there and watch. Maybe it is some mild form of ADD, maybe it’s normal.
I am using Github Pages to host the xml for the feeds, and the videos are hosted on Amazon cloudfront by their owners. You can find some RailsCasts and Confreaks videos at the moment, but the feeds like the channel are open source, so if you have any content you’d like to add, please send me a pull request to the gh-pages branch.
So what does this have to do with Ruby + Graphs?
Well, I asked the Neo4j guys and they’re letting me have their videos on there as well. So if you want to see Andreas Kollegger tell you how to get started with Neo4j on your 60″ big screen at home, now you can.
The code is available at https://github.com/maxdemarzi/madcodertv be sure to check out the gh-pages branch for the video content and send me a pull request if you have any videos you want to add!
Checkout a screenshot:
Update: So far 6500 developers have installed the channel. If you have no idea what I’m talking about, a Roku is a little box you attach to your TV and the internet and let’s you stream videos from over 400 channels.
Max De Marzi 