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Anonymous
Visitor

FLV Container Support Survey

I've seen a few people request FLV container support. If you're one of those, I'd like to ask a couple of questions:

  1. What FLV content do you want to play? Yours or someone else's? If someone else's, whose?

  2. If it's your FLV content, what's preventing you from supporting other containers?

  3. Which particular codecs do you need for FLV? Anything beyond h.264/AAC?
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20 REPLIES 20
campbellwang
Visitor

Re: FLV Container Support Survey

I guess they are talking about sites like YouTube.com, ABC.com, Hulu.com, Cwtv.com, Fancast.com, Crackle.com, and MTV.com etc.
That’s only my guess. I have no real interest in this question.
CDNOne.com | CDNTwo.com
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rkondaveti
Visitor

Re: FLV Container Support Survey

I would like to see FLV support on roku.
The videos that we stream are ours since we ingest our client's videos and re-encoding them to flv at the moment. Nothing's preventing us from switching to mp4 / wmv. We just want to unify the content over our various platforms. It would be nice to have flv. It would be nice to see ogg vorbis support as well.
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DeftOne
Visitor

Re: FLV Container Support Survey

Not to completely send this thread off into a tangent right away or anything, but if you are asking about file container support, I'd be most interested in VOB support. I'm not sure if that's even possible with the current hardware, but thought I'd throw it out there anyway. If I'm way off base, just tell me to shut up. 😉

The recent local network streaming solutions being created with the SDK are very exciting, but the time required to rip and subsequently encode an entire DVD collection to the strict encoding requirements of the Roku DVP is a severe barrier to entry. If the Roku DVP could support VOB file playback directly, and not require the lengthy encoding process, it would certainly streamline things and truly open it up for local network streaming. BTW, I am not a developer -- just a loyal Roku DVP user who really wants the local network streaming solution to work as best as possible.

Thanks, and sorry for the side-bar. 🙂
Roku2 XS (13A166000325) HDMI to LG 42" LCD 1080p (42LH30)
Roku XDS (K0A073000137)
Netgear WNDR3400 (all Rokus wireless)
25 Mbps
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KennyJ
Roku Guru

Re: FLV Container Support Survey

I'm not a developer, but I agree with DeftOne and would add that additional support of existing containers is also needed -- just overall better support of mp4, etc would be nice. It seems that with test of mp4/m4v podcasts, it can be hit and miss.
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JC77
Visitor

Re: FLV Container Support Survey

I'm not a developer either, but support for Divx/AVI files would also be much appreciated. I have a lot of AVI files, and it would be very helpful to have some AVI support on Roku. It would save us the trouble of converting them (a painfully slow process) for local streaming.
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supersecretuser
Channel Surfer

Re: FLV Container Support Survey

flv container support is already there. It's not recommended, but it does work. I believe people are asking for legacy flash support (not H.264 in a flash container). The Roku chipset documentation (yes, I've read it) says it doesn't support it. What some of the guys here don't understand is codec support is in silicon.

The Popcorn Hour uses the Sigma Designs SMP8643 it can handle many more formats, but i think it's slightly more expensive than the NXP.
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Anonymous
Visitor

Re: FLV Container Support Survey

That's what I want to understand. We've got some level of FLV support in there, but not documented or officially supported, but for those that are asking for FLV, why and for what content?

Patrick
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supersecretuser
Channel Surfer

Re: FLV Container Support Survey

"RokuPatrick" wrote:
That's what I want to understand. We've got some level of FLV support in there, but not documented or officially supported, but for those that are asking for FLV, why and for what content?

Patrick


Patrick,

There's *alot* of video out there in legacy flash format. I think most of the guys here are interested in using other peoples content that's in flash, more like what boxee is allowing. Don't want to get into boxee's business model too deep, but I think they are going to have some issues when the content owners find out that people are building "channels" without permission that bypass their advertising revenue stream or put content on a TV.

<rant>Here's something to think about...you already know this Patrick, but for the benefit of the forum....most movie and television rights owners are not very interested in moving to the internet, just to have someone move them over the internet back to the TV. They are *already* on the TV, and they make money off of cable and their affiliates. The loudest uninformed proponents of over-the-top seem to think that somehow the content needs to be free. It's not and web advertising isn't going to pay for it. Sorry to say, the broadcasters have a 70 year old giant network that's working just fine for them right now. This is *exactly* why there is no Hulu on set-top boxes.</rant>

EVTV deals with a lot of content that isn't ours per se as we gateway other peoples video, but we've never run into anyone that only had flash video. Some weird wvm or h.264 encode, but not flash. But if we did, they would have to re-encode, and that's not something that is feasible most of the time.

It's my opinion that putting a lot of effort into legacy flash support would be a waste of time.
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dsfilms
Visitor

Re: FLV Container Support Survey

Yes I think expanding to flash would be a good move.

I would think Hulu, Crackle, Fearnet ect could utilize the platform
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