How Do I Subscribe To the Vibesworkshop Roku Channel?

Instructions for creating subscriber channels on Vibesworkshop.com on Roku

The Vibesworkshop.com on Roku application allows subscribers to create individualized channels of videos for display (see Check This Out for more info on the app). At release, I've seeded the app with channels for Ed Saindon, Joe Locke, Tony Miceli and myself.

To create your own channel, go to http://vibes.phelan-4.com/roku/ and sign in with your Vibesworkshop username and password. Initially you'll need to create your channel, so click on the "Make your channel" link. Enter the requested data in the form and click "Submit" to create your channel. The most difficult part of this is the logo -- it's best if the logo image is 290x218, and there's a limit of 100K bytes for the size, so don't try to upload something directly from your 8M pixel camera :-).

After you've created your channel, you can add videos by clicking on the "Add new video" link. The easiest thing to do here is to grab a video from YouTube. Just copy the YouTube URL or embed code and paste it into YouTube URL input box and click "Submit". The video title, description, thumbnail and length will be filled in automatically from the YouTube data.

After you've submitted a YouTube video the highest resolution version will be downloaded and converted automatically. You can monitor the progress of this via the "Status" column of the video list (refresh the page to see updates). When the status reaches "Ready", click on "Ready" to view your video (you'll need to have QuickTime installed).

You can also upload videos directly from your computer. This is more work but it'll give you more control over the results since conversion isn't needed. The Roku Player plays in 720p so 1024x720 pixels is the best size for the videos.

If anyone has any problems, questions or comments, post them here or e-mail me at tom at phelan-4 dot com.