Roku Developer Program

[PRMan99]

Hi, guys.

I have my video encoded as HLS (fragmented MP4) up at Amazon S3.  I got a single video to show up in a test channel and the channel looks good but the video won't play.  It doesn't even try (well, it does for less than 1 second).

How do we troubleshoot this?  The video plays perfectly everywhere else, including on all phones and tablets made in the past 5 years.  So I was a little surprised that Roku choked on it.

Here is a link to the video:

http://drmrjuyh9ifi8.cloudfront.net/1D7 ... BD91C.m3u8

If anyone could let me know the problem (or better how I can troubleshoot it myself), that would be great.  

Thank you very much.

[renojim]

Someone more knowledgeable than me will have to chime in, but I don't think that's supported by Roku. I've never seen an MP4 split into fragments like that with a separate audio URI.

-JT

[PRMan99]

That was done by Shaka Packager, BTW.

[RokuBen]

I looked at the M3U8 files you posted and saw that it was using byte-range addressing for HTTP Live Streaming.  I did some debugging, and it looks like it's a bug in the current handling of byte ranges -- they're not respected when handling the "#EXT-X-MAP" tag, so it tries to read the whole MP4 file in instead and it exceeds our allowed file size.  I'll file an internal issue on this, but for now, best if you can split into lots of files instead of using subranges.

[PRMan99]

"RokuBen" wrote:
I looked at the M3U8 files you posted and saw that it was using byte-range addressing for HTTP Live Streaming.  I did some debugging, and it looks like it's a bug in the current handling of byte ranges -- they're not respected when handling the "#EXT-X-MAP" tag, so it tries to read the whole MP4 file in instead and it exceeds our allowed file size.  I'll file an internal issue on this, but for now, best if you can split into lots of files instead of using subranges.

That costs too much on Amazon S3 since they charge per file on many things.  I would rather have 10 files per video than 1000.
Would it help if I could make a Dash .MPD for the same MP4 file?  I'm not sure I can, but if you think it would work I'm wiling to look into it.

[RokuBen]

I don't think you need to have per-segment to fix this, just the map file, but I'm still debugging.

[rymawby]

Was there a definite outcome on this? Also when will the firmware update with this fix be in? I think I'm having the same issue.

[PRMan99]

RokuBen private messaged me that a fix for this issue would potentially be in the Q4 update.  This is probably not a certainty yet, but if they did do it, it would be the soonest they could.

I was able to re-run Shaka Packager with the -mpd_output option in addition to the -hls options (you can run both at the same time now) and I was able to use the same fragmented MP4 files.  I can do this later even if I didn't do it originally, meaning I can do it locally and only upload the .MPD xml file.  This DOES play on Roku and I am now adding this file to all my encodings so that I can play it on Roku.

[bikegriffith]

"RokuBen" wrote:
it looks like it's a bug in the current handling of byte ranges -- they're not respected when handling the "#EXT-X-MAP" tag, so it tries to read the whole MP4 file in instead and it exceeds our allowed file size.  I'll file an internal issue on this, but for now, best if you can split into lots of files instead of using subranges.

Is there any update on this issue? We're trying to move a lot of content to HLS fMP4 and this bug is a big showstopper for us. 

[norcaljohnny]

I was able to duplicate the same error.BUT when I set the streamFormat="auto" it played.