Roku Developer Program

[ooshwa]

Hoping this post saves somebody the time and frustration I wasted:

When requesting a secure, live HLS stream from Akamai (master.m3u8?[token]), Akamai will return two cookies ("_alid_, "hdntl") that must included in the subsequent requests for a particular stream's manifest (m3u8). There appears to be a bug in the Roku's roVideoScreen in that even if you use "EnableCookies", only ONE of the two cookies is returned with subsequent requests.

My workaround is to grab the other cookie with an initial roUrlTransfer request, and then manually add it to the header. This method, however could fail if whatever configuration makes Roku ignore the "hdntl" cookie begins ignoring the "_alid_" cookies instead (eg: order in the header perhaps). Ignoring of the "_alid_" would be even more problematic as the cookie will eventually change with subsequent segment requests.

This is just my dev code (not cleaned up), but hopefully it will help:

	req = CreateObject("roUrlTransfer")
	req.SetPort(CreateObject("roMessagePort"))
	req.SetUrl(radioFeed)	
	req.EnableCookies()
	req.EnableFreshConnection(true)	
	if (req.AsyncGetToString())
		event = wait(30000, req.GetPort())
		if type(event) = "roUrlEvent"
			if (event.GetResponseCode() <> 200)
				DisplayDialog("No Live Feed", "Please check back later.")
				return
			endif
		
			headers = event.GetResponseHeadersArray()
		elseif event = invalid
		    print "AsyncGetToString timeout"
		    req.AsyncCancel()
		    return
		else
		    print "AsyncGetToString unknown event"
		    return
		endif
	endif

	for each header in headers
		val = header.LookupCI("Set-Cookie")
		if (val <> invalid)
			if (val.Left(5) = "hdntl")
				hdntl = val.Left(Instr(1,val,";")-1)
			endif
		endif
	end for
			
	port = CreateObject("roMessagePort")
	screen = CreateObject("roVideoScreen")
	screen.SetMessagePort(port)
	screen.EnableCookies()	
	screen.AddHeader("Cookie",hdntl)
	stream = {
		HDBranded: true
		IsHD: true
		StreamBitrates: [0]
		StreamUrls: [radioFeed]
		StreamQualities: [0]
		StreamFormat: "hls"
		Live: true
	}
	screen.SetContent(stream)
	screen.Show()

Another issue I have is that I cannot get the Roku player to adjust to a higher bitrate stream (it only takes the first), despite ample bandwidth (confirmed with roSystemLog bandwidth). The only way I can force it to the higher is with MinBandwidth, in which case, it plays without buffering (but obviously I'm hurting potential viewers with lower bandwidth). Here is the manifest returned by Akamai:

#EXTM3U
#EXT-X-STREAM-INF:PROGRAM-ID=1,BANDWIDTH=698000,RESOLUTION=640x360,CODECS="avc1.77.30, mp4a.40.2"
http://REMOVED-lh.akamaihd.net/i/REMOVED@51143/index_650_av-p.m3u8?sd=10&rebase=on
#EXT-X-STREAM-INF:PROGRAM-ID=1,BANDWIDTH=698000,RESOLUTION=640x360,CODECS="avc1.77.30, mp4a.40.2"
http://texaggies-lh.akamaihd.net/i/REMOVED@51143/index_650_av-b.m3u8?sd=10&rebase=on
#EXT-X-STREAM-INF:PROGRAM-ID=1,BANDWIDTH=1548000,RESOLUTION=1280x720,CODECS="avc1.77.30, mp4a.40.2"
http://REMOVED-lh.akamaihd.net/i/REMOVED@51143/index_1500_av-p.m3u8?sd=10&rebase=on
#EXT-X-STREAM-INF:PROGRAM-ID=1,BANDWIDTH=1548000,RESOLUTION=1280x720,CODECS="avc1.77.30, mp4a.40.2"
http://REMOVED-lh.akamaihd.net/i/REMOVED@51143/index_1500_av-b.m3u8?sd=10&rebase=on
#EXT-X-STREAM-INF:PROGRAM-ID=1,BANDWIDTH=48000,CODECS="mp4a.40.2"
http://REMOVED-lh.akamaihd.net/i/REMOVED@51143/index_650_a-p.m3u8?sd=10&rebase=on
#EXT-X-STREAM-INF:PROGRAM-ID=1,BANDWIDTH=48000,CODECS="mp4a.40.2"
http://REMOVED-lh.akamaihd.net/i/REMOVED@51143/index_650_a-b.m3u8?sd=10&rebase=on

Anybody have any ideas?

[RokuJoel]

Do you have a SwitchingStrategy set? Try Stream.switchingStrategy="full-adaptation"

Without that, no bitrate switching is likely to occur.

- Joel

[ooshwa]

Thanks Joel! I thought that was already the default, but looking back at the docs, I see it is probably not. You might pass long that the docs are little unclear as to the actual default value as they read:

...Default is "no-adaptation"...

but, it also says:

"full-adaptation".... This is the new default.

When I tried the value, it did switch to the higher stream (1548kbps) for a moment, but then switch back to the lower (698kbps) and remained. All the while, the syslog was reporting bandwidth between 3000-4000. Strange that bandwidth reporting number anyway; network throughput at 50mbps, confirmed during test.

Any thoughts?

[RokuChris]

"ooshwa" wrote:
When I tried the value, it did switch to the higher stream (1548kbps) for a moment, but then switch back to the lower (698kbps) and remained. All the while, the syslog was reporting bandwidth between 3000-4000. Strange that bandwidth reporting number anyway; network throughput at 50mbps, confirmed during test.

Any thoughts?

Network throughput and measured bandwidth are different things. Measured bandwidth is an average of the rate that data is being received from the content source and can be affected by lots of factors. There have been many discussions of this in the past.

viewtopic.php?f=34&t=64720

[psatish]

Hi,
We were facing the same problem. We tried the workaround suggested by ooshwa and it worked.
However the stream stops after a few minutes with error code "unknown error" Tried to play around with adaptation strategy etc , but no effect. The error is accompanied by a screen close event, so no further recovery is possible. Any ideas on how to debug this further would be deeply appreciated

Satish