In the “New Roku Certification Criteria” email, one of the items is:
Trick play thumbnails. Channels must display thumbnails during trickplay for VOD content that is 15 minutes or longer.
Trick play thumbnails may be generated using either Roku's proprietary BIF file format or the new DASH and HLS standards for generating thumbnail tiles, which were announced as part of the Roku 9.3 OS update.
What are Trick play thumbnails ?
According to Wikipedia :
Trick mode or trick play is a feature of digital video systems, including digital video recorders and video on demand systems, that mimics the visual feedback given during fast-forward and rewind operations that were provided by analogue systems such as VCRs. Trick play manipulates the video stream to include only a subset of frames
In the official Roku Developer Documentation :
Trick mode
Trick mode provides visual feedback during playback operations such as seek, forward, and rewind. This function lets a user visualize the timestamp of the content they are seeking. The Roku platform supports two types of trick mode.
For channels generating and publishing image archives in the Roku BIF (Base Index Frame) HLS, or DASH standard file formats, a scene-based trick mode using index frames is supported.
When the resources necessary to support scene-based trick mode are not available at playback time, a time-based method of supporting trick modes is used instead.
How to generate Trick play thumbnails and the bif files we need ?
Easy using a free software you can download from here :
Only for windows so sorry Mac users .
The software has a step by step guide in the Help section.
What now ?
After we have all our bif files we need to upload them on a good quality hosting , take the links, and use those links in your json feed .
If you are lucky enough to use TV Boss Fire to build your Roku and / or Amazon Fire feeds – they already have implemented the bif files option so just take a link , copy paste into the app like you do with your video links , save , done. * if you don't know about TV Boss Fire , you should take a look , easy copy / paste system to generate feeds for Roku and Amazon Fire)
Couldn't be easier.
If you still need guidance or help with a good hosting or using the bif generator ,