As referenced in this old thread -
viewtopic.php?f=34&t=25954This still doesn't work. The bif files are fine because if they are on another server, or on Amazon S3, they load and the video plays.
The video is fine because without the bif file on the same local apache LAN server, the video plays.
When they are both hosted by Apache, the buffering bar never fills up and it comes back with a timeout -5 error media corrupt.
It would be great if a solution could be found, or this could be fixed. Even with hosting bif files on USB, that will work with the newest beta firmware, but even if that goes live, it won't help anyone with old roku boxes on firmware 3.
Plex resolved this problem by setting up a proxy server and secondary 'bif provider' service. I have set up a Raspberry Pi with apache just to serve bif files, so that works for me - and at 5 watts of power per hour it's not that big a deal - it was just a big hassle to set up (DHCP reservation, ftp setup, apache configuration, fiddling with SD card imaging, etc etc).
It's real easy to duplicate the issue - on a windows box, install Apache. Put an mp4 file in the htdocs folder. Create and place a bif file for that in the htdocs folder. Set the firewall to allow access on port 80. Have any roku channel try to load and play said file and bif file with rovideoscreen - using the 192.168.x.xxx IP of your pc. I guess I'm not surprised this wouldn't be fixed in four years, and it's not like a lot of people are doing this, but the limited threads documenting the issue ought to get someone there to at least acknowledge the problem exists.
BTW - on another note - the stated ffmpeg command for generating graphics does kind of work - I suppose it depends on your source video file. Most of the time for me it generates 3 of the same image and then an image from ~8 seconds, followed by 19 seconds, followed by 27 seconds, etc - it is fast, can be batched to do hundreds of videos, etc etc - but it is truly sloppy in the results, requiring files to be renamed after it's done, and so on. I tried builds of ffmpeg going back from the latest and 'greatest' to versions in 2008 and all exhibit this problem.
The way I resolved it was using VirtualDub and a plugin to allow loading MP4 files. The 'ffmpeg input driver' mentioned here -
http://www.donsalva.com/2011/07/03/how- ... virtualduballows that. So you can load your mp4 into virutaldub, go to video/framerate and select "decimate by". If your video is 25fps then decimate by would be 250. If 23.976 then 239 would be 'close enough' - 29.976 would be 299 or 300...
Well, then go to Video/Filters and add 'resize' to set your image dimensions (320x240) , and then file/export image sequence.
It starts the numbering at 0, you can set the number of leading 0's, defaults to JPG and you can set quality, and it's faster than ffmpeg (at least it seems faster to me). Then you can run the standard biftool, python, ruby script or whatever you use for the images and it turns out accurate results.
