Roku Direct Publisher

[shakespearegeek]

After giving up on Vimeo we switched all of our videos (400+ of them) to an AWS S3 bucket. I've confirmed that we can get at the MP4 files by accessing them directly, so the public read permission seems to be fine.

My feed ingests correctly, telling me all the items were processed successfully.  When I go into the feed myself and randomly sample the video URLs that are being provided, they work fine.

But on my channel, all the content fails to stream.  The items are there, with descriptions and thumbnails and a Play button. But clicking play just causes the item to flash and return to where it was.

Is there something else I need to do to stream from S3? I thought the public read permission and browser confirmation would be sufficient but maybe not.

Also I did hit the "convert" button since I know that Direct Publisher is sunsetting, but that was after the problem started and doesn't seem to have affected it.

[Baradanikto]

Be careful in assuming that if your feed ingests ok, everything is fine. Roku only checks for json syntactical errors. It does not check logic errors.  For example, tags that are mismatched with a category.

If you post your feed here, we can take a look and see if anything is amiss.

[shakespearegeek]

Thanks for responding. The weird thing is that this feed has worked for months. Literally the only thing that's changed is swapping out the video URL. The feed format itself is generated by using Vimeo's Showcase feature to expose what it calls a Roku Feed.  I then run a script of my own to go lookup the videos in our database and swap out the vimeo URL for the S3 URL.

Right now our content exists in two places because we haven't completed a final move. Vimeo is where we've got our titles, descriptions, tags, and thumbnails.  But we'd found over recent months that the videos were being flaky and then they announced that they're getting out of the TV apps game anyway so we started finding a new home for our videos, at least.  The rest of the content will come in time.

Maybe there's some other attributes of the video in the feed that I also have to change, because the S3 version isn't described properly by what's left untouched in the Vimeo original?

Thanks!  Attached is one movie item from the feed for closer examination.

{"providerName":"finStream.TV",

"lastUpdated":"2023-06-15T09:44:21-04:00",

"language":"en",

"movies":[

{"id":"716906300",

"title":"3 Phases of Retirement",

"shortDescription":"Bob Powell, ... ",

"thumbnail":"https://i.vimeocdn.com/video/1446029731-9a15f1181723a0a0f27b3cb4ffbaa78442a59dc5abcc2d884dba571d9dca...",

"releaseDate":"2022-06-03T16:00:44-04:00",

"genres":["educational","news","technology"],

"tags":["Life Events"],

"content":{"dateAdded":"2022-06-16T08:20:08-04:00",

"duration":1095,

"videos":[

{"url":"https://finstreamtv-videos.s3.amazonaws.com/3_phases_of_retirement+(1080p).mp4",

"quality":"FHD",

"videoType":"HLS",

"bitrate":null}

]

}

},

{"id":"533553168",

"title":"...

[Baradanikto]

You've got two potential problems:

"releaseDate":"2022-06-03T16:00:44-04:00",

The date the movie was initially released or first aired. This field is used to sort programs chronologically and group related content in Roku Search. Conforms to the ISO 8601 format: {YYYY}-{MM}-{DD}. For example, 2020-11-11

"bitrate":null}

Bitrate is not a valid field in the Json spec.

[shakespearegeek]

Thanks for the tips, I'll try them out.  Right now though, I seem to be having trouble with Feed Status - it's not updating.  I tweak my feed (keeping the URL the same), then go to the feed status page and hit Refresh Now.  It tells me to wait a few minutes, which is fine; it's always done that. But in like 10-15 minutes at the most I usually get to know if my feed is ingested.  

It's been days.  All I see is:

The service is still processing your feed. Please check back again for updated status.

The last listed update was 6/27.  The page is not refreshing for me. So I don't have any way of knowing if it's the page that's just not showing me status, or if no changes I'm trying to make to my feed are getting through. I know that my channel is still responding the same way it has been, where videos will not play.