Roku Developer Program

[bisform]

Hello, I am part of a video streaming company. We recently gave our customers the option to use their Roku to stream. While it seems to be running smoothly for most people, we do have a handful of customers that are saying when they select play to view one of our videos, it will only load for a second and then revert back to the previous screen without ever playing the video. I have noticed that these few people are using a Roku2 2400x or a Roku 2 XS. Has anyone else experienced anything like this and if so do you know why or how to fix it.

[belltown]

There could be many reasons why a video won't play. It would help to have a link to the video in question.

Also, have you tried debugging the channel in developer mode, examining the video player events for clues?

[Romans_I_XVI]

The Roku can be touchy with encoding, just because it's a .mp4 doesn't mean it will play consistantly. Need more info to identify anything for sure though.

[bisform]

Thanks for the replies. There is no link I can send as the videos are only available to paying subscribers. I can say that one of the customers having this problem just received her Roku 3 today and everything is running smoothly. The videos we offer are 720p and I know the Roku 2 says it can stream 720p but is there a different spec between them that could cause this. I do see the Roku 3 is 5x faster. Could that be the reason the Roku 3 streams fine while the Roku 2 is having difficulties?

[belltown]

How about posting a Mediainfo printout of the affected video, which will help in determining whether it is encoded correctly. And what kind of server are you using to stream the video?

[Rek]

"bisform" wrote:
Thanks for the replies. There is no link I can send as the videos are only available to paying subscribers. I can say that one of the customers having this problem just received her Roku 3 today and everything is running smoothly. The videos we offer are 720p and I know the Roku 2 says it can stream 720p but is there a different spec between them that could cause this. I do see the Roku 3 is 5x faster. Could that be the reason the Roku 3 streams fine while the Roku 2 is having difficulties?

Perhaps the Roku 2 users in question are using SD mode, and your channel is not handling that correctly. We had a similar problem and it turned out to be caused by not providing correct SD options to the player.

There are a few options that take aligned arrays:

   content["StreamBitrates"]  = [0, 0]
	content["StreamQualities"] = ["SD", "HD"]
	content["StreamUrls"]      = [properties.playlistUrl, properties.playlistUrl]

Notice the bitrates and urls are duplicated. This is because they must be specified for each quality and happen to be the same for both SD and HD modes.

Another important bit of info is that Roku 3's do not have SD mode, so that might explain why Roku 3's are unaffected. Your issue might be unrelated, but its worth checking.

[TheEndless]

"Rek" wrote:
There are a few options that take aligned arrays:

   content["StreamBitrates"]  = [0, 0]
	content["StreamQualities"] = ["SD", "HD"]
	content["StreamUrls"]      = [properties.playlistUrl, properties.playlistUrl]

As an FYI, the aligned arrays have been deprecated. You should use the Streams array instead, which is much easier to manage.

But to add to/confirm what you're saying, if the stream quality is set to "HD" it will not play on a box set to an SD resolution, so that's definitely worth checking.