Roku Developer Program

[DJ_Lucas]

Guys and gals, having a bit of an issue with a modified (and stock) videoplayer sample. The hardware is an XD with 3.0 build 2227 attached to a 35" SD television (I suspect this may be related), server is bare bones Apache, built from source with near stock configuration to rule out any issues with the distro's modifications, streaming module is not installed. Videos are Blu-ray rips, and were re-encoded with Handbrake (using v1=vbr, 2pass, 6100kbps, 1280x720, a1= AC3 5.1 640kbps, a2=AAC 2.0 Stereo 160kbps) in a web-optimized mp4 container (m4v) with 720p in the file name. The same videos play fine in Roksbox using the same Apache server (just path moved). Permissions have been double and triple checked (in fact, everything is 2775 root:apache right now...which needs to change quickly!). The video begins loading, sometimes (rarely) I get the first blue bar (10%??) but it never displays any of the content (black screen only), and then it immediately exits back to the video information screen. I am able to successfully stream the video using mplayer (but mplayer plays damn near anything IME). These videos are for in-home use only, so the high bit-rate shouldn't be a problem (it isn't with Roksbox), but perhaps I could do an encode of a short public domain sample with the same settings if needs be. Here is the limited debug output (obfuscated):

------ Running ------
created feed connection for http://testhttp.example.com/roku/xml/categories.xml
url: http://testhttp.example.com/roku/xml/categories.xml
Took: 27ms
Parse Took: 8ms
begin category node parsing
number of categories: 3
ParseCategoryNode: category
category: Sales | testhttp.example.com Sales Videos
categoryLeaf: More Stuff []
ParseCategoryNode: categoryLeaf
added new child node
ParseCategoryNode: category
category: Training | Training Videos
categoryLeaf: Session 1 []
ParseCategoryNode: categoryLeaf
added new child node
ParseCategoryNode: category
category: More | Other Internal Recordings
categoryLeaf: Other []
ParseCategoryNode: categoryLeaf
added new child node
Traversing: 70ms
showHomeScreen | msg =  | index =  1
showHomeScreen | msg =  | index =  1
list item selected | index =  1
created feed connection for http://testhttp.example.com/roku/xml/training1.xml
url: http://testhttp.example.com/roku/xml/training1.xml
Request Time: 25
Show Feed Parse Took : 193
showPosterScreen | msg =  | index =  0
showPosterScreen | msg =  | index =  0
list item selected | current show =  0
created feed connection for http://testhttp.example.com/roku/xml/training1.xml
url: http://testhttp.example.com/roku/xml/training1.xml
Request Time: 34
Show Feed Parse Took : 189
ButtonPressed
ButtonPressed
showHomeScreen | msg =  | index = -5
Video request failure: -5  7
showHomeScreen | msg =  | index =  0
Screen closed
Button pressed:  2  0
ButtonPressed
ButtonPressed
showHomeScreen | msg =  | index = -5
Video request failure: -5  7
showHomeScreen | msg =  | index =  0
Screen closed

Thanks in advance for any suggestions.

[belltown]

You say you have an SD TV. Are you setting the StreamQualities to "SD" in your code? According to the Streaming Player Component Reference, "If the user is configured for SD the system will not select HD streams for playback."

[DJ_Lucas]

"belltown" wrote:
You say you have an SD TV. Are you setting the StreamQualities to "SD" in your code? According to the Streaming Player Component Reference, "If the user is configured for SD the system will not select HD streams for playback."

Thank you very much for quoting exactly, allowed my search to see what my eyes wouldn't.

I had suspected something to that effect, just couldn't find it in black and white. It is in the "Important notes on video playback" section, and I think I understand how to work around it. The device is certainly capable of it as Roksbox does manage to play the files on an SDTV...probably time I buy an HDTV for my office anyway, but I'd still like it to work on SD say for overnighters at the hospital paired to a laptop. IIUC, Just use two (identical) URIs and mark them SD and HD, the video will simply scale down in hardware. I'll give it a shot later this evening.

EDIT: Works great! Not sure it this is correct: the XML file now has two <media> blocks, one with StreamQuality HD and a second with SD, and the ContentQuality value is "HD,SD". If it is not correct, I'll fix that later (that's only in the XML on the web server). Now to get the media info screen the way I want it....

Thanks again.

-- DJ Lucas