I have successfully "unlocked" the mystery of using .bif (Trickplay) files with Direct Publisher.  I wrote a Powershell script that creates the images and bif file(s) when given a video file as input.

Requirements: 

• Minimum Windows 7 x64
• Powershell 3.0 or higher.

Usage:

• Create a folder on your pc.
• Download BIFMaker zip file to that folder.
• Unzip the archive.  There should be three files.
• Open a Powershell console and set your "execution policy" to RemoteSigned.  The script file is digitally signed, so, setting your execution policy insures that only signed scripts will run.
• Run the bifmaker script:  .\bifmaker <name of video file or path>    ex. .\bifmaker "c:\temp\my video file.mp4" -verbose    ex. .\bifmaker "c:\temp" -verbose
• The script will extract video images from the video into two separate folders and create an SD and HD bif file from the images.
• The .bif files will be created in the same folder as the script file.
• Upload the .bif files to your server and update your json feed accordingly.

Notes:
The Roku JSON spec is somewhat misleading.  The Trickplay files example implies that the url should be pointing to a folder (ie. it's missing the file extension on the url.).  However, the only way I could get it to work was to specify the exact url for the .bif file on my server.  I'm not sure how Roku will handle SD vs HD bifs given that discrepancy.

For customers of my JSON Feed Manager, creating bif files will be automated in the next release.

Please use this thread for any problems or discussions.

This is fantastic!

Not to complicate things, but a common tool (discovered via the SDK forum) is the free BIF Creator software: http://www.burningbushsoft.com/index-1.html .  I used this exclusively for SDK based channels and the BIF files worked great.  I'm finding they DON'T work for DP channels (which still puzzles me).

I mention this for other folks searching the forums, but ALSO if anyone knows why these BIF files no longer work with the DP channels.

As an update:

1.  Roku apparently requires both an FHD and HD BIF file to show ANYTHING during RWD and FastFWD....at least with HLS files.  Once I defined FHD and HD BIF files, they showed up....but just defining one does not work.

2  BIF files created with BIF File Maker by Burning Bush software are OK .

To be clear, are you saying that the script did not produce files that work with HLS?

I ended up re-using the BIF files I created with BIF Video File Creator.  I didn't want to recreate all of the BIF files if I didn't have to. 

I only mentioned HLS as I'm not sure if the video file declaration in the JSON changes the way BIF files work....as HLS, by nature can be 1 of many quality streams (SD and HD), while, say, a single MP4 is stuck at the resolution it is. 

I more posted so folks searching the forums later would have a roadmap.

Thanks for the clarification.  I will, however, change the script to process a folder of video files rather than just one file.  I'll post back when it's done.

 I have successfully "unlocked" the mystery of [color=#6a6a6a]using .bif (Trickplay) files with Direct Publisher. I wrote a Powershell script that creates the images and bif file(s) when given a video file as input. Requirements: Minimum Windows 7 x64; Powershell 3.0 or higher. Usage: Create a folder on your pc. [/color]

I've updated the script to accept the name of a single video file, or, the path to a folder that contains multiple video files.  When invoking the script, make sure to pass the -verbose flag to see script output.  For example,





will process the 'c:\temp' folder for all video files.