"belltown" wrote:
It still seems a little odd that the server would generate a playlist file reusing the same 6 segment files over and over again. I'm not surprised though that VLC and my browser's media player only played the last 41 seconds, whereas the Roku kept looping, It's been my observation that the looping is normal behavior for the Roku when it gets confused playing an HLS stream.
Well it clearly should've been trimming the past segments (i.e. slide the window) since they are overridden/deleted. And should bump the EXT-X-MEDIA-SEQUENCE with that. And should've spelt EXT-X-ALLOW-CACHE correctly and try to give it the right argument. And specify EXT-X-TARGETDURATION that won't be exceeded. And re-using file names is not that bright idea either, under
Postel's law.
This particular m3u (the first one i have looked inside, to be honest) - makes me appreciate the kind of shiddy* video streams that a player like Roku has to handle. One can trust if something can be misused - it will be**. And if it simply cannot be misused - it will be, anyway (Murphy's law corollary). Regardless, the player will be expected to go above and beyond and play the video - just like web browsers have to deal with screwy html.
(*) portmanteau word, of organic fertilizer and "shoddy"
(**) i remember someone kept a trail of all the things that different RSS feeds have done wrong - i think their company have written an aggregator of late Google Reader kind and had to apply different patches for thousands of feeds - hard to believe how long the list was. (I am trying to remember where was that but no luck so far.)
