Roku Developer Program

[cbckenny]

Hello everyone! We just got our app working and streaming live video, and I wanted to pass on what we learned in one post so that other people won't have to hunt through as much stuff. Hopefully this helps someone!

All of this information was gathered through multiple forum posts that we read through hunting down the problem, many thanks to the original authors!
Also, I'm not sure what has been updated to be needed or not needed in the recent SDKs, we were using 2.7 and then 2.8.

I can't help very much with the Wowza setup itself, we're using a 3rd party to manage our live streams (both in Roku and online). Here are the adjustments we made to get it to work with a h.264 stream (Profile: Main, Level 4.0), AAC video streaming from Flash Media Encoder 3.1 (FMLE).

Live.xml (or whatever you decide to call it)
Move:
<streamFormat>hls</streamFormat> outside of the <media> tag
Add (outside of <media> tag:
<Live>True</Live>
<MinBandwidth>64</MinBandwidth>
(from my understanding setting a low MinBandwidth tag keeps Roku from ignoring the Wowza "chunks")

showFeed.brs
Add:
item.minBandwidth = 20
in Function parse_show_feed(xml As Object, feed As Object)
(again, fixing the Wowza chunking problem. I know this one is necessary, the <MinBandwidth> might not be but it doesn't seem to be hurting anything either)

After those changes were made, we were able to stream live from our Wowza feed. Again, I hope that helps someone who is struggling to get this to work.

Kenny

[RokuKevin]

Earlier versions of Wowza software set streams to a bandwidth of 64k in the variant .m3u8 playlist by default.

Since the Roku ignores streams lower than 250k by default, the Roku doesn't recognize these Wowza streams. Setting the minBandwidth parameter to a value lower than 64k is one workaround that resolves these incompatible defaults.

I'm not sure what is implied by Wowza "chunks", but maybe you meant lower bandwidth streams...

--Kevin

[nevinfd]

Is there a simple shell streaming app that you used to test out your Wowza stream ?

I'm assuming the format for the live stream is http://(IP):1935/live/name.stream/playlist.m3u8 ?

On the side note, can you message to me the guys you use to manage your streams ? I might also ask for their services.

[cbckenny]

We use a company called 316 Networks to host our streams and on demand content. They can also provide turn-key encoders.
The link is here: http://solutions.316networks.com/

As for testing the stream, we did that with an iPad 🙂

[RokuKevin]

Try editing the simplevideoplayer sample app to point to your wowza stream and test it out...

--Kevin

[sberner]

Many thanks cbckenny for your post and fix for live Wowza streams it saved me a ton of trouble and I still have all on my hair!

[cgerrish]

Has anyone streamed VOD content off of S3? Right now its just progressively downloading, but when I try to do it using vods3, its not working. Any tips?

[stratcat96]

"RokuKevin" wrote:
Try editing the simplevideoplayer sample app to point to your wowza stream and test it out...

--Kevin

Kevin (or anybody)

I have a few .m3u8 playlists that I'm messing with on the simplevideoplayer example. Does an associative array need to be made in order to set minimum bitrate or can it be set amongst the parameters of the single url (i.e. qualities=[SD] Streamformat= etc.)? The few that I have to play around with are all coming from Wowza servers as well..

oh, and since the quality of the stream is lower would it be recommended to lower the screen size?

[destruk]

"cgerrish" wrote:
Has anyone streamed VOD content off of S3? Right now its just progressively downloading, but when I try to do it using vods3, its not working. Any tips?

I'm not sure what you mean by progressively downloading? It does stream just fine for our instance. By S3 you mean the amazon server cloud right?

[cgerrish]

Right now I am just linking to the files saved on Amazon S3 storage. I can't seem to get it to stream through an EC2 Wowza Server, streaming from a S3 bucket. It works fine on a flash player or iPhone, but can't get it to connect on the roku.