Roku Media Player won't play some audio formats after OS update

Yep, Roku's gonna do what they're gonna do.  As will I.

I will say that Roku lost at least one customer over this latest snafu (namely, me).  I was in the market for a new TV, and I had been considering a Roku smart TV (e.g., TCL) until this latest fiasco.  Roku's timing to roll out its new (broken) OS, a month before Black Friday, could not have been more fortuitous.  Thus, my new LG TV from Costco will be delivered this Wednesday.  It should play videos via USB as well.  But you know what?  If it doesn't, I'll be buying a streaming device for the LG that can, and it won't be a Roku device.

I will put the older "non-smart" TV upstairs.  I was hoping to continue to use my Roku streaming device with it, but I guess I'm in the market for a new streaming device for that TV as well.

It has been quite a while since this problem has been reported.  Not only does the sound not work the captions do not work, and on some platforms the video is jerky.  I have given up believing that Roku will solve the problem.  If I buy a new device will that fix the problem?  Or should I just ditch Roku and find another platform to use?

This has been going on since 10-19-24 and still you haven't corrected the issue with media player not playing sound.  I chatted twice with customer service and after going through all the resetting and powering down and unhooking it still didn't work.  They finally acknowledged that they were aware of the problem and were working on it.  That was 4 weeks ago, and still no update to fix.

i don't know what the update fixed, and i don't care.  Why haven't they fixed the issue or rolled back the firmware to before the erroneous update?

Worst customer service ever......

I have been testing my Ultra 4800 this afternoon. I can't say what build I'm running, since this Roku is part of the beta test and I have an NDA for anything related to the beta builds. While my Roku is connected to an AVR, it was turned off for most of this testing so the AVR was being bypassed and the TV handled all audio.

I tested Roku Media Player with both some files on a USB drive as well as streaming from my DLNA server. To be clear, everything I tested from my server is being sent as is, with no transcoding necessary. This testing included files in the MKV, TS/M2TS and MP4 containers, with video codecs MPEG2 (H.262), AVC (H.264) and HEVC (H.265). The audio codecs included AAC (5.1), AC3 (2.0 and 5.1) and DTS (5.1). In every case I had audio for every file. The only exception was the DTS file, since my TV doesn't support that codec. But when I switched my AVR I had audio.

I could find no combination of files, codecs, or server/USB based that made any difference. The one file that would not play had FLAC audio, and I have a hunch that file is corrupt (the same file on my server played fine) so can't be played by anything. 

I don't think the fact I'm running a beta OS build is why it's all working. I've tested these files since this thread was first posted and hadn't had any issues. But it appears Roku is addressing whatever was occurring for the users with problems. 

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Phorrest wrote:

I have moved on from Roku.  My new LG TV plays videos from a thumb drive just fine, including playing formats that my Roku 3 could not play (e.g., H.265).  For "off-brand" streaming services like PBS Passport or Kanopy, I'm going to get an Amazon Firestick.  Problem solved.

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H.265 wasn't an approved codec at the time the Roku 3 was released, so I would never have expected a device of that age to play it. The only Roku devices that support H.265 are the 4K devices, which again the Roku 3 did not support. Personally I don't care for the Amazon Fire devices solely because of the Amazon-centric user interface. But that's a personal choice, so you go with what works best for you.

Hi, RustyHusky.

Thanks for informing us about this here in the Roku Community!

We understand your concern about the Media Player not playing any audio after an update, and we would like to help you resolve this issue.

Could you please provide the following valuable information below?

• Roku device model, serial number, device ID, and OS version. (these can all be found in Settings > System > About)
• Tracker ID (when you see this issue occur, press the Home button five times, followed by the Back button five times, and provide us with this ID)
• Format of the file

We are looking forward to your response.

All the best,
Emman

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Sammo77 wrote:

Not only does the sound not work the captions do not work, and on some platforms the video is jerky. 

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What sort of media are you playing with captions? If your media comes from DVD or Blu Ray rips, you will never get captions. The captions used on almost all DVDs and Blu Ray discs are what is referred to as Image based caption. They are not an embedded text string like TV broadcasting uses. Roku devices have never supported image based captions. If you want captions for media like that, you either need to use a different player or download a captions file from a site such as opensubtitles.org. They provide a text based file in the SRT format, which all Roku devices support. 

Thanks, that answers that question!

Roku Media Player hasn't been updated for at least 3 years, and for video playback it's been more than four. I don't know what Roku is doing but at the moment RMP seems to be completely ignored. I can't even get the beta team to acknowledge any work being done. 

There is no update to roll back to that will resolve the issue. They need to fix something in the core OS, and I don't think they know what they broke.

At least as far as I can tell, the only update possible is one that updates the OS, so yes, it sure seems to me that reverting back to the last good OS would fix this issue, at least for now.

Back in April 2022, an OS update broke USB functionality, and a subsequent OS update was issued about three weeks later that fixed this functionality.

I was using the USB feature both before, during, and after this last OS catastrophe, and I can affirm that it is an OS update this time that has broken the USB functionality in Roku.  It was working before the update to 14.0.4, and now it doesn't.  It's not at all unreasonable to suggest that rolling the OS back to the version that was running just prior to 14.0.4 would restore USB functionality to Roku's devices.

Roku 3 no longer recognizes Seagate external USB

Except Roku won’t roll back an OS update unless there was a catastrophic failure, and that isn’t the case here. Unfortunately, we who have a use for RMP are a very small minority of users, and they won’t roll back the OS version for everyone just for us. As I mentioned, RMP hasn’t received any updates for a very long time, and so far there doesn’t seem to be any effort to improve it. 

Not the answer you want, and not the one I want either. But it seems to be the case at this time. 

For my local media, I use the Nvidia Shield, since it passes all audio through to my AVR. But sometimes a family member uses my Roku to watch stuff from my media server, mostly because of the easy user interface. I have good reason to use both devices, so this issue is just mildly annoying, but not a deal breaker. And with some streaming services the Roku is actually the best solution. There is no single media player that “does it all “. 

Thanks for the suggestion (Nvidia Shield) - I will definitely check it out!  I'm guessing a company like Nvidia will know what they're doing in the A/V world... 😏

There's a few things the Shield doesn't support, YouTube HDR being one of the big ones. As I said, there's no single device that can do it all. Besides the Shield (I have three throughout the house) I have Roku (about six or seven devices), a Fire TV Cube (got it for testing purposes but really don't like the Amazon-centric interface) and an Onn 4K Media Player (Walmart house brand, it's similar to the Shield but less powerful and still doesn't pass all the lossless audio codecs to an AVR). 

Thanks for sharing that info; I'm hopeful that it means that Roku is indeed working on the problem.  At least for a stable-release-channel user like myself, the OS / build versions have not changed yet, and I'm therefore still encountering the no-audio issue.  BTW, although I didn't mention it before, I have also tried going through the DLNA server of the AP that feeds my Roku 3, but that (not surprisingly) resulted in the same outcome.

I would like to continue using Roku if possible; I find their UI very intuitive and easy to navigate.

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Phorrest wrote:

 BTW, although I didn't mention it before, I have also tried going through the DLNA server of the AP that feeds my Roku 3, but that (not surprisingly) resulted in the same outcome.

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That's dependent on the DLNA server and how it streams the media. I am the author of the Roku profiles included with Serviio, and I can say that none of the profiles will transcode any Dolby Digital audio, regardless of the container. Since it's a supported codec for literally every TV and AVR available, there's no need for it. But there is one profile that I believe transcodes everything (audio and video) although I'd need to look at the profiles file to confirm. I believe the DirecTV profile will do that. However, I think it transcodes the audio into AC3. So it's debatable if that would help. I could pretty quickly create a profile that transcodes any audio into PCM or AAC, and that shouldn't be a problem for the Roku. But it's not something that I can get added into the Serviio installation quickly so that's something I would need to provide directly to a user. 

If you used a DLNA server built into a router/access point, none of them have any ability to transcode anything (video takes a lot of power but audio not as much) so they're simply sending the media intact without changes. That would be why you didn't see any change.

This same issue happened to my Roku Ultra a couple of years ago and it seems the problem is back again after this October update. It took forever to even acknowledge the issue before. Crazy that 2 months later the issue is still not resolved. 

I have moved on from Roku.  My new LG TV plays videos from a thumb drive just fine, including playing formats that my Roku 3 could not play (e.g., H.265).  For "off-brand" streaming services like PBS Passport or Kanopy, I'm going to get an Amazon Firestick.  Problem solved.