Roku Developer Program

[rvempati]

Sorry for the confuse. I am able to play MP4 (video files) now from Roku Channel. But I still have problem playing MP3 (audio files). When I access through ROKU Channel I can see the mp3 folders. When Click on the folder I get a confirmation dialog with message "No media items retrieved. Is the media path set correctly? Does the selected path contain playable files?". When I look at the logs I see the error message as "library failed to parse ID3 tags for".

Please help on how to resolve the problem at mymedia server.

[rvempati]

I think the problem is with Pythin 2.7.2 version. Some one had the similar issue and able to fix it by down grading it to 2.6. Will try.

[rvempati]

Yes, Python 2.6 resolved the issue. Hope, this help others.

[renojim]

Ah! Yes, 2.6 is the only guaranteed to work version of Python. Glad you got it worked out!

-JT

[chrisrob83]

The server software has suddenly stopped working for me. When running from Python 2.6.1, I get this error

ensure("server_ip", socket.gethostbyname(socket.gethostname()))
socket.gaierror: [Errno 8] nodename nor servname provided, or not known

Not at all sure why it stopped working or how to fix it! =(

[renojim]

What OS are you running? I think it means that it can't figure out the host name of your server computer. Running on Windows, if I add a print socket.gethostname() statement before the ensure statement (in common.py) it prints out JT-Alien, which is the Computer Name I've assigned to my laptop. You might want to try to add the print statement to see what you get.

print socket.gethostname()
print socket.gethostbyname(socket.gethostname()))
ensure("server_ip", socket.gethostbyname(socket.gethostname()))

The output I get when I start the server with the two added print statements is:

JT-Alien
192.168.1.100
http://0.0.0.0:8001/

-JT

[xwin]

Make sure that "hostname" command prints something meaningful and /etc/hosts file contains resolution from that name to the IP.

[xwin]

Hi,
I added a post to my blog that documents some of my experiences with encoding for Roku2. I think some of you may find it interesting especially the part about Xvid encoded content. Check it out here http://thingsiused.blogspot.com/. Please let me know if you find it useful.

Thanks.

[renojim]

That looks like a lot of good information. I've gotten in the habit of just running everything through Handbrake since I have a couple of powerful computers and I'm rarely in a hurry (and I also don't care much about video quality - everything looks great on my SDTVs), but I'll have to try that Xvid trick sometime.

As for MKVs, I don't believe streaming them is documented as being supported and they definitely don't work at all on Roku 1s.

I have one more trick you can add. I've seen FLV files that use compatible codecs, they just need to be repackaged. For example, I've used StreamTransport to grab a replay from ESPN and they use H.264 and AAC. Using FLV Extract to extract the streams and MP4box to repackage them, no re-encoding is necessary.

-JT

[xwin]

JT,
Yes, I know about FLVs. I documented this in the FAQ on MyMedia wiki, together with the command to do the conversion. Some FLV files use VP8 and must be transcoded. The other ones use AVC(h264) with AAC audio and these can simply be repackaged in to MP4 container.
By the way my chained server modification did not work well for some reason. Client goes to the second server but crashes when browsing the directory structure. I need to debug the client and don't really have the time to do it. Some day, I guess.

The chip in Roku does decode various codecs, too bad they would not fix MKV format. It is probably the best container in circulation IMHO. It also should not crash the box the way it does. I can understand it not playing but it should not crash the box.

Thanks.