Roku Developer Program

[ThirdWaveSka]

I'm at my wits end with an audio artifact issue that I'm having.  I am running ShoutCast v2 and every channel that my stream is on with Roku has artifacts. The artifacts are on TuneIn, ShoutCast and Third Wave Ska channel.  However this only is an issue on the Roku. This is not happening on PC, Ipad or AppleTV in Shoutcast and TuneIn apps. BellTown was kind enough to do alot of work to isolate the issue (thank you) concerning Roku treating metadata as sound. Every service that I use has a support staff to discuss this with. I have discussed this with WaveStreaming, ShoutCast, and TuneIn, all of them say that it's Roku not being configured properly.

However, I cannot find any way to contact Roku developers support. The support page from Roku is for end users only. They have no contacts and suggest this forum. I cannot find a Roku developer to respond. Is there anyway that I can get Roku to take a look at my issue?

A very detailed look at the issue is in this thread
https://forums.roku.com/viewtopic.php?f ... ts#p537216

Thank you so much. I really want my channel on Roku.

[EnTerr]

Theoretically, there is:
Developer at Roku.com

Practically speaking, somehow they don't feel compelled to answer most emails - it's survival of the fittest (or naggiest). So be very explicit yours is not rhetoric question. And if you have Daddy BigBucks, be sure to mention it 🙂

[ThirdWaveSka]

Thank you EnTerr. I have very specific information so I'll be sure to format it that way. The Big Daddy Bucks however.....

[TheEndless]

As belltown mentioned in the thread you linked to, it is not normal for a Shoutcast server to include the ICY-Metadata unless you specifically request it. The fact that your server is sending it in every case would suggest that there's a configuration issue on your end. I think it's unlikely that contacting Roku support would provide you any more insight than that.

With that in mind, however, Roku added support for MP3 metadata to the Audio SceneGraph component in firmware 7.2, albeit woefully underdocumented. It's not clear if that could be used for ICY metadata or not...

[ThirdWaveSka]

Thank you TheEndless.
Dang it, this is the first time that I heard that the metadata is not included by default. It makes sense that it would be. How else would you be able to artist, title and album art for an individual song? Well it's off to post the same email to Roku, ShoutCast and WaveStreaming support.

Thanks for all the help people. It's certainly been more of an education than I was ready to receive.

[TheEndless]

See here for a mini-explanation of how it's supposed to work: http://www.smackfu.com/stuff/programming/shoutcast.html

Typically, if you want ICY metadata to be included, you'd add the "Icy-MetaData:1" header to your request to let the Shoutcast server know that you support it. It's possible, if you send "Icy-MetaData: 0" instead that it could explicitly disable the metadata, so you might give that a try.

[RokuMarkn]

We have done some research into this issue, and as far as we know right now, the problem has nothing to do with the embedded metadata.  The problem seems to be that the Shoutcast encoder is framing the MP3 packets differently than we've seen anywhere else.  We are still looking into this.

--Mark

[RokuMarkn]

See Aaron's analysis in this post:
https://forums.roku.com/viewtopic.php?p=537488#p537488

It turns out that the problem is indeed the embedded metadata, and it appears that for some reason the server is returning the metadata when it sees Roku/DVP in the UserAgent string.  Perhaps there is some server configuration that can be changed to stop it from doing this.

--Mar

[ThirdWaveSka]

Are you asking for a change in the server configuration from Wavestreaming, Shoutcast or Roku? Two out of Three of those require my involvement and I don't want to hold things up. 

[belltown]

"ThirdWaveSka" wrote:
Are you asking for a change in the server configuration from Wavestreaming, Shoutcast or Roku? Two out of Three of those require my involvement and I don't want to hold things up.

It certainly looks like the Wavestreaming server is doing something it shouldn't. However, the good news is that there is a workaround from the Roku side of things -- have the roAudioPlayer send a User-Agent HTTP header with something other than the default "Roku/DVP". I noticed the same thing as Aaron as I was playing around with my own audio player trying to track down the problem. With that workaround I was able to play your stream flawlessly.

I believe TheEndless is the developer of the Roku SHOUTcast channel. If he doesn't respond here, you might want to send him a PM to see if there's anything he can do to implement the workaround and get your stream playing on that channel.

Also, you can test out your audio stream on my SIMPLEAUDIOPLAYER Private Channel. I've just updated it (version 1.9.2) with the workaround.

And let me know if you need help figuring out how to implement the workaround in your own channel.