Forum Discussion

dandev's avatar
dandev
Visitor
10 years ago

Avoiding HLS bitrate streams that are > 1080p?

Hi,

I'm working with HLS streams that have bitrate streams with 2k and 4k resolutions. On the Roku 3, if there's enough bandwidth, it will try to play these streams and since its max resolution is 1080p, it displays a bunch of digital noise.

My current solution for avoiding this is to set the content's MaxBandwidth var to be low enough to not hit the >1080p streams, however the BANDWIDTH settings are different for each video I play, so I'll probably hit an edge case one day that screws up the playback again.

Is there another solution for this? The .m3u8 files I'm working with do have the RESOLUTION set for each bitrate stream, but I'd like to avoid writing a separate parser. Note that setting SetMaxVideoDecodeResolution on the video player does not work.

Cheers,
dandev
Roku Developer Program

3 Replies

  • RokuJoel's avatar
    RokuJoel
    Binge Watcher
    10 years ago
    SetMaxVideoDecodeResolution is for the case where you are using 2D graphics and want to play video - it reserves memory for the video playback - useful for playing video in any of our custom UI screens like roScreen, roImageCanvas and roSgScreen, it isn't for filtering out bitrate variants.

    I think you will need to download the master playlist to tmp:/ and parse it, this shouldn't be too difficult to implement within the Roku channel. then point the video playback function at the parsed file or, you could do the parsing/rewrite on your server

    - Joel
  • TheEndless's avatar
    TheEndless
    Roku Guru
    10 years ago
    "RokuJoel" wrote:
    I think you will need to download the master playlist to tmp:/ and parse it, this shouldn't be too difficult to implement within the Roku channel. then point the video playback function at the parsed file or, you could do the parsing/rewrite on your server

    Unless this changed very recently, Roku's HLS implementation won't work with local playlists. It has to be hosted. If it hasn't changed, at the risk of derailing the topic slightly, consider it an enhancement request to support M3U8s via tmp.
  • dandev's avatar
    dandev
    Visitor
    10 years ago
    Thanks for the replies. Looks like I'm going with the parser.