Roku Direct Publisher

[AndrewL]

I am using Vimeo (I am looking for another solution) and I now get a required video url is unreachable on two videos. Everything was working 2 weeks ago, last week all videos disappeared from account for part of the day after adding a new video. I deleted that video, then checked the Roku channel and all videos where back including the one I deleted.

After adding the new video back to the showcase it never showed up on the Roku channel so I deleted it again. Several days later I added the new video back to the channel and I started getting the ingestion error message for a previous video, still no new video in channel.

19 items ingested successfully

04/17/2022 10:58PM

1 item has an error: Required video url is unreachable.

»  Red Car Route Cypress California

The next day after adding new video

19 items ingested successfully

04/18/2022 11:01AM

2 items have error: Required video url is unreachable.

»  Red Car Route Cypress California

»  Military Tank Museum (this is the new video)

I now have the thumbnails in the channel but none of the videos play.

[AaronMSpelling]

from your text ( the showcase) I assume you are using Vimeo Pro? 

well, these things just happen  - try to switch to a properly built feed  - using Vimeo pro as hosting  - 

[AndrewL]

Thank you. yes, they said they escalated it to their engineering. When I emailed to see what they did, the message was nothing. It seems the just sat on the request until it cleared up. But it went through other unusual changes before it went back to normal.

[phlume]

I've noticed this has been happening on our SP channel a lot lately too. We use vimeo and manually stitch the JSON from multiple showcases into a single feed we host on our site. THis allows us to add categories, and sorting and series, but harness the power of the SP and Vimeo feed generator. Unfortunately though, I have noticed that the url string for videos within the feed have changed recently and now include an "expires" parameter that seems to change from day to day.THere seems to be some other info added in as well that wasn't there in early April.

Older videos (Prior to April 10th or so...) had a formatted url with "rendition" in the middle along with the resolution, the loc parameter then the signature:

.../rendition/1080p?loc=external&signature=...

Now videos (Added to showcases after April 10th or so...) include "container" instead, along with a very long key/string, a new "expires" parameter with the 10 digit code, then the location and signature:

.../container/63952ccf-982c-4339-bb6e-4bf728532e95/dba43351?expires=1652234289&loc=external&signature=...

I've tried to keep an eye on it and see if there's any "pattern" in place, but I haven't noticed anything yet. It seems to only affect recent videos within the last 3-4 weeks.

[Baradanikto]

@phlume There's no need to "manually stitch" multiple JSON feeds.  I've made available a FREE software solution to combine multiple JSON feed files into one.  Look for "DPFeedMerge" at the GitHub site in my signature below.

[phlume]

appreciate the plug on the service @Baradanikto , but this doesn't help solve the feed issue from the OP. You're helping to simplify a step further down the chain, but if the problem persists before you, then your solution doesn't help us.

I've researched this within the Vimeo Expert forum on Slack and they have no idea on the issue (mostly platform users and creators, as opposed to vimeo engineers).

As a test I tried following the core vimeo link generated within the showcase and using the raw akamai link as the video url, but that also failed. Maybe it was a format issue? The link pointed directly to an .mp4 vs a redirect string for cached versions of the video.

[AaronMSpelling]

the truth is that Vimeo changes the link structure quite a lot - probably to block as much as they can the use of Vimeo links directly in other systems and use the tv channel packages they offer at a quite high cost.

We solved all this by properly building up the feed  -   and not using the showcase they offer - but the direct video link you can get if you have a pro account. 

There are a couple of apps to do that quite easily - just look around in the forum  you will find some- 

[phlume]

We have a pro account and we used to have links from the showcase that worked fine. However, now when we place direct link into the DP roku feed it fails.

For clarification, when you add links, are you placing the Vimeo link that is generated when the "share link" button is clicked? The one that has the formation as such: https://vimeo.com/684305559.

[AaronMSpelling]

no - you need the direct video link 

go into the settings / advanced / in the left side  - distribution / video file links 

and choose the link for the quality you want to use 

it should look something like in the image 

[phlume]

Wonderful. This should help immensely, thank you.