Roku Developer Program

[jasonwhitehorn]

Hey folks.  Brand new here to the forum.  Pretty new here to Roku Dev.

 I have a new Chan.  My stream keeps giving an error that my feed URL ( https://vimeo.com/showcase/7003490/feed/roku/39551b265b ) is failed.

Says"

"Unable to download from feedUrl.: Exception Response code other than 200 from https://vimeo.com/showcase/7003490/feed/roku/39551b265b for 582898.pending.en: 403 Forbidden for 582898.pending.en"

It also reports weird time stamps in Roku like 

"12/31/1969 07:00PM"

I'm lost and out of my depth here.  Any help would be greatly appreciated.

[37mediagroup]

You had the unfortunate timing of creating it during an ongoing 'glitch' with Roku channel feeds and Vimeo hosting. Seems Vimeo did some backend change recently that affecting it working with Roku DP. We've gotten responses that 'They're (both) looking into it' for about 3 weeks now. Mine came back, but they didn't tell me not to update the feed, so when I made a change it went down again. Such is life here.

I'd recommend sending an email to partnersuccess@roku.com with you channel name etc, or just keep an eye on the forums for others to update.

For what it's worth there's a separate section for Direct Publisher, which I take it is what your channel was built with. Please check & post there in the future, this forum is for channels essentially built via pur scripting.

[jasonwhitehorn]

Thank you.  Ill reach out now via email

[iAelien]

I just launched my channel yesterday and I am having the same exact issue. However, I'm not using VIMEO, all my hosting is done on WordPress with JSON. That let's me know that the issue might indeed be Roku.

[37mediagroup]

Where are your videos being hosted?

[iAelien]

on Wordpress under videos. 

[37mediagroup]

Like a Wordpress.com site?  Are you using that Instant TV Plugin or whatever Roku channel builder?

Regardless I don't think that sort of hosting works for streaming. At a minimum you'd need to have some form of web host package like GoDaddy or something, even with that you'd need a pretty serious server. A wordpress.com sites shared hosting wouldn't allow for 3rd party access, also it's url is likely using forms of redirects so a www.mywebsite .com/videos/video1.mp4 likely has a much longer url path, but it's redirected a bit on the backend. This is the situation with Youtube urls and Roku doesn't continue in looking for it's redirected path, it's kindof a 1 attempt only.

You'll likely need a streaming hosting provider, such as Vimeo Pro, Amazon S3 or other streaming hosts.

[WCCTV]

Unable to download from feedUrl.: Exception wcctv.org:443 failed to respond for 582423.pending.en]

Does anyone know why I am getting the message with feed status?

[Baradanikto]

I don't know if this will cause your problem, but, all of your 'releaseDate' fields do not conform to the Roku schema.  The schema defines 'releaseDate' as:

Conforms to the ISO 8601 format: {YYYY}-{MM}-{DD}. For example, 2020-11-11

Keep in mind that Roku does not do a good job at identifying problems with your feed file.  Especially subtle errors.