Forum Discussion

jzachary's avatar
jzachary
Streaming Star
5 years ago

HLS Live Links Not Showing up

My HLS links for Live streams have stopped working in Roku suddenly. In the Developer Dashboard my feed shows a -Required video url is unreachable- For my live streams obviously the link would be offline if I'm not streaming. How do you supply an HLS link for an upcoming stream without Roku throwing an error? A week or so ago Roku didn't seem to care and would display the content anyway, and when I was live it would work fine, if we were not live it just wouldn't play but the content item would still be visible. Did something change recently in how its handled?

Thanks!

Roku Direct Publisher

13 Replies

  • Baradanikto's avatar
    Baradanikto
    Roku Guru
    5 years ago

    This question has been asked before on this forum.  A simple search should help provide what others have done to resolve the issue.

    As for changes, is it possible that the update from Roku 9.3 to Roku 9.4 is the reason that you're now getting this message?

    • jzachary's avatar
      jzachary
      Streaming Star
      5 years ago

      Yeah, i have not seen any solution or explanation of the issue on this forum. Every thing i've read was unresolved or not the same issue. And there wasn't much info in general. Possibly there's more that I cant find, i dont trust the search function. This forum is terrible, every time i post i get HTML errors and it won't let me post. Janky would be a compliment.

    • 37mediagroup's avatar
      37mediagroup
      Roku Guru
      5 years ago

      I didn't realize this was a recent issue as for some time (a year or two) I thought Roku crawled channels and found if a channel had videos that weren't there, they removed them to benefit the end users so they don't encounter dead links or videos which don't play.

      I know Roku did a change Oct 1, maybe it was enhanced then or affected something in your flow. With that said, the simple fix is to stream a graphic ("Please Standby") while nothing is going on, although that might increase any livestreaming fees you pay, although I would think marginally.

      Depending how often you are live vs not, you could change the URL from the .m3u8 live video, to an ondemand video, again, one that says Standby or Not Currently Live or something. Again, these are basic workarounds, I don't see Roku reverting this method back so might as well try to adapt with it.

      • jzachary's avatar
        jzachary
        Streaming Star
        5 years ago
        Streaming graphic 24/7 just seems like a terrible approach, and changing the URL from an on demand to live wouldn't work either as the feed takes so long to update, I could do that now and it would take hours to hit the channel. Even setting the Start date for a live item doesn't help, it still gives the error even though based on the timestamp it shouldn't be visible yet.