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siftikha's avatar
siftikha
Visitor
8 years ago

[SOLVED] Inconsistent playback failure

I have a roku app playing videos over dash with playready drm. The playback works about 90% of the time, but the 10% of the time it fails with the message 

"An unexpected problem (but not server timeout or HTTP error) has been detected."

The error code is "-3"

The non deterministic nature of the error makes me think it isn't an error with the video encoding or anything like that. Do any of you have any recommendations for troubleshooting this error?
Roku Developer Program

2 Replies

  • siftikha's avatar
    siftikha
    Visitor
    8 years ago
    I added an additional "print m.videoPlayer.completedStreamInfo" in my error logging and the issue, which had persisted for several days, stopped happening entirely. I remove it and it starts happening again. Excellent developer experience.
  • tim_beynart's avatar
    tim_beynart
    Channel Surfer
    8 years ago
    Your logging "fix" is unreal! I wonder if that works in a production channel.
    It is very difficult to get any useful diagnostics for video failures. For example, one issue was our segment requests were returning HTTP 403 errors, but Roku surfaces it as that useless -3 error code. Only by sniffing packets with Wireshark and Charles are we able to figure out what is broken.  Without external tools it would be impossible to figure out what was wrong.
    Good luck.