The other day, I wrote about a new Roku Player that we recently got. I mentioned, that you can connect to port 8080 on the Roku to send commands, similar to what you do with the remote control:

press up
press down
press left
press right
press select
press home
press fwd
press back
press pause

I mentioned getting an Android app, RoMote that uses this to make the Android a Roku Remote. It works pretty nicely. However, there are other ports, 8085, 8086, and 8087 that are open that no one seemed to know what they were.

I received various comments about what other people are doing, much of it around YouTube. Playing around with the Roku, I couldn’t find YouTube, so I searched online, and found out about private channels. Private channels work like the regular channels on a Roku, but you have to go to the Roku website, login, and enter a code for a private channel there. Then, the new channel will show up in your channels on the Roku.

thenowhereman has a list of a couple of the key private channels, including YouTube, Archive.org, Twitter, UStream, NASA, and PodTV. PodTV is a neat channel that gives you lots of different podcasts to chose from.

To me, this raised the question, how do you create a channel? Can anyone do it? Well, it looks that way. Roku Developer gives you information about becoming a developer. It is free to be a standard developer. On the site, you can download the developers kit, the developers guide, and lots of other fun stuff.

In the developers guide are two interesting tidbits. The first is how to get into developers mode. On the remote, you enter “Home 3x, Up 2x, Right, Left, Right, Left, Right”. I had problems the first couple times I tried because I entered back instead of Up. When you get Developers mode running, it starts a webserver on the Roku that you can use to install programs. It also mentions that port 8085 is the debug console, so you can see what is going on while the programs you are testing run.

There are lots of other interesting combinations, such as one to turn on tcpdump, etc.

So, what are developers doing? One idea that I find interesting is to use Roku as a MythTV front end. I’m not running MythTV right now, but it seems like an interesting thing to try. To push things further, people are writing about Boxee and Vudu and Mubi. Perhaps I’ll figure some way to tie together some of these different pieces.