The five samples in this repo demonstrate different ways to generate and incorporate thumbnails for trick play. The samples vary based on whether they use standards, BIF or custom JPEG files for the thumbnails, whether they use the native or a custom video player, and whether server-side ads are included in the thumbnails.
Beginning with Roku OS version 9.3, an option to use standard DASH thumbnails (Dash Interop Guidelines section 6.2.6) and HLS thumbnails (draft-pantos-hlsrfc8216bis- 04 extension) is available. More details are available on the docs page. Legacy implementations using BIF or custom thumbnails is still valid.
The standard HLS and DASH is now the recommended way to support trick play thumbnails, both for channels that use the firmware's built-in stream thumbnails and channels that use custom trickplay thumbnails. When a stream uses standard thumbnails, Roku firmware supports it natively and thumbnails are displayed during trick play on Roku Stream Tester. The sample presented here is for channels with custom UI for trick play.
BIF is the former recommended format for thumbnails on channels that use the firmware’s built-in video player. Therefore, the BIF samples use the native video player. Using the BIF format entails creating the BIF files using the biftool, putting the files on a server, and adding the BIF image URLs (sdbifurl and hdbifurl) to a ContentNode that is then passed to a Video node. Both BIF samples demonstrate how to configure the ContentNode and Video nodes.
The samples with JPEG thumbnails use a custom video player that features custom trick play logic, a progress bar, and a video buffering status loading bar.
The five samples are summarized as follows:
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standard-HLS-DASH uses standards based thumbnail tiles for trick play thumbnails, and includes a sample implementation for a custom UI for trick play.
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simplevideo-with-bif uses BIF for trick play thumbnails and does not include ads.
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RAFSSAI-with-bif uses BIF for trick play thumbnails and includes server-side ads in some of them.
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simplevideo-with-jpeg uses custom JPEG files for thumbnails, which are generated using the script gen-thumbs.sh and extracted at constant intervals. A group of five Posters that represent 5-second intervals are used to display the thumbnails.
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RAFSSAI-with-jpeg is similar to the previous sample using custom JPEG files, but it is aware of ad pods using metadata from the Roku Advertising Framework and ads are not displayed in the trick play thumbnails.