Keeps Smack-Fu Master, in training
23y
86

sryan2k1 said:

I'd pay any amount of money for a Roku remote with ABCD buttons I could configure rather than the streaming platforms of the month (seriously, buy a replacement remote and it's buttons are unlikely to be the same as the one it is replacing). But they know what makes them money, unfortunately.

That's a pretty low bar for all the money! That's how I've run my Roku for the past ten or fifteen years; any universal remote that can send arbitrary REST commands can do this.

All you do is send a "POST /launch/<appid>" command, where <appid> is a unique number for the app inside Roku's database. That ID used to be exposed in the web addresses on https://channelstore.roku.com, now it's obfuscated somewhat, but you can go to http://<Roku IP Address>:8060/query/apps to get a list of all the installed apps and their IDs on any particular Roku.

Depending how fancy you want to get with the remote, Roku even hosts thumbnails for each app on its internal web server, so that http://<Roku IP Address>:8060/query/icon/<appid> gives you each specific icon, and you can build a copy of the app list with direct launching and everything. There are other commands and features, but it looks like I caught Roku half-transitioned to a new website - the old documentation was here: https://developer.roku.com/docs/developer-program/debugging/external-control-api.md And the new documentation looks like it's started to be here: https://github.com/tispratik/docs-1/blob/master/develop/guides/remote-api-ecp.md And neither seems to be complete at the moment.