Roku Developer Program

[destruk]

This same video, with the same channel code works fine when the video is pulled from an Amazon S3 server, but from a IIS server it fails with either error code -3 or error code -1. We turned off the firewall on the IIS server and it still won't play the file.
The file plays fine in internet explorer, and the file plays fine if we move it to the Amazon S3 server and change the xml link to that too so I'm confused.
http://beta.tin.info/roku/tin/content/gnctv_720p.mp4

[destruk]

actually, the file in question doesn't play on roku on any server...It does play in media player when downloaded through internet explorer.
Because the servers involved play other video files fine, that leads me to believe it's an encoding issue for the files that don't play.
Would encoding at 30.0000 fps generally fail on Roku?

The content attributes state -
FrameRate
Integer
roVideoPlayer or roVideoScreen
Specify the 1080p stream was encoded at 24 or 30 fps.

However, the specifications for streaming specify 23.976 fps or 29.97 fps

For the file that doesn't play, I get this info --

MSG = An unexpected problem (but not server timeout or HTTP error) has been detected.
INDEX = -3
TYPE = 9
DATA = 0
INFO = StreamBitrate: 2000000
MeasuredBitrate: 4374

[destruk]

Well, it is some kind of file encoding incompatibility. Better error messages would be nice, but I'm not sure how you could explain what was wrong further than - invalid framerate, unknown codec, insufficient interleave or something. How would it be able to tell what was wrong with the video file if it can't play it to figure out what it is?

[kbenson]

Doesn't the container contain some metadata explaining what the specifics (codec, framerate, possibly length) are?

I seem to remember there being an issue with the framerate a while back, where the 29.97 FPs rate had a problem when run at 30 fps, but only after a certain period of time. I think that was fixed though.

[destruk]

We have encoded a whole lot of videos... probably thousands by now for lots of different channels. I don't do the encoding myself but I have looked at MediaInfo for the files and their settings are all usually varied. The main sticking point for the video that doesn't play is that it reports 30.000 fps - none of the videos that do work report that, they have some other framerate. We corrected the encodes to what Roku prefers and they work now - but better error messages on starting a stream would have saved us a couple days checking server configs, software settings, channel code and authentication systems....