I’m new to the forum and to streaming. I looked earlier on what platforms were being used for streaming. I ended up setting up Wowza. However I’m having an issue where by longer videos will just stop after 5-15 minutes of play. This happens with videos that are say 30 minutes or longer. Short video’s which are 10 minutes or less play to the end. I can see in the logs that the TS files and playlist is created for the longer ones, but the videos stop at around the 95th chuck with an “application context error” in the Wowza logs. I’ve been working with the Wowza support, but just seemed to be spinning my wheels now. So here is the question(s): What applications/methods are you folks using to stream with? I’ve tried FFMPEG server for a bit, but wasn’t able to get anywhere other than creating the TS files and converting formats. I also looked at the Darwin streaming server, but opted for Wowza due to the fact that I was able to start streaming fairly fast.
Another question is what other protocol can one use to stream to the ROKU, It seems that HTTP is the preferred method, what was the “old way”? I see questions on RTSP and understand that is not possible. I have been hunting through the forum but haven’t been able to find these answers. Sorry if its been mentioned before, seems like it would have been. I’ve spent way to much time on Wowza and I’m a little frustrated right now at having to switch to some other method. Thanks again
“dnet” wrote:
I have Linux(ubuntu server) and W2K3 running. apps for either os is fine, thanks
If your talking about using an existing channel/app to stream your own media, then there are Roksbox, Chaneru and Gabby that you can use on a Windows box. There are pros/cons to each one. When you look at maturity, ease of use, and cost you will find what’s best for you. If you’re talking about streaming for you own channel, I don’t believe there are any “apps” that will support what you’re looking for. Typical streaming server applications (typically) don’t serve media in one of the formats the Roku supports. I think that’s why you see everyone “reinventing the Tversity wheel”. If you want to stream media, the requirement are fairly simple. You need an HTTP server that supports byte range requests – you can use IIS, Mongoose, Apache, or roll your own. You also need properly formatted media – for the most part that means MP4s (encoded with H.264/AAC), WMVs (encoded with WVC1 or WMV3/ WMAv2), MP3s, and WMAs. You also can deliver streams via HLS transport streams – that is, encode videos with H.264/AAC and deliver it MPEG-2 Transport Stream (DVB) by way of HLS.
“dnet” wrote:
I’m new to the forum and to streaming. I looked earlier on what platforms were being used for streaming. I ended up setting up Wowza. However I’m having an issue where by longer videos will just stop after 5-15 minutes of play. This happens with videos that are say 30 minutes or longer. Short video’s which are 10 minutes or less play to the end. I can see in the logs that the TS files and playlist is created for the longer ones, but the videos stop at around the 95th chuck with an “application context error” in the Wowza logs. I’ve been working with the Wowza support, but just seemed to be spinning my wheels now. So here is the question(s): What applications/methods are you folks using to stream with? I’ve tried FFMPEG server for a bit, but wasn’t able to get anywhere other than creating the TS files and converting formats. I also looked at the Darwin streaming server, but opted for Wowza due to the fact that I was able to start streaming fairly fast.
Another question is what other protocol can one use to stream to the ROKU, It seems that HTTP is the preferred method, what was the “old way”? I see questions on RTSP and understand that is not possible. I have been hunting through the forum but haven’t been able to find these answers. Sorry if its been mentioned before, seems like it would have been. I’ve spent way to much time on Wowza and I’m a little frustrated right now at having to switch to some other method. Thanks again
funny you should mention this. because it is the EXACT problem we are having. we use wowza for our server-side streaming solution. and we deal with videos that are typically an hour-long. they always seem to stop after 15-20 minutes of playback using the HLS streaming method. we eventually had to resort to the MP4 (http progressive download) method until this issue could be fixed. i feel the fault may lie with the ROKU’S implementation of HLS.
another issue seems to be that the ROKU is not maintaining the 4:3 aspect ratio of videos streamed through wowza (and displayed on a 16:9 screen). but i talked about this in another thread somewhere at some length and no solution was found for that either. again, it could be ROKU’s implementation of HLS.
We are not sure where the problem lies. We have been streaming live streams to the Roku that have latested hours. It is important that segment size is a consistent 10 seconds. For this to be possible the key frame interval must be multiple of 10 seconds (2, 2.5, 5…). If the segments sizes vary too much there could be an issue with the session timing out. Of course the session timing out does not necessarily indicate that the problem is with Wowza. Dnet, I think we have suggested that you increase the validSessionTimeout for the cupertinostreaming entry in conf/HTTPStreamers.xml. If you set this value to 50000 or more you should alleviate the problem of the stream timing out due to inconsistent segment sizes. Not sure if the Roku guys have looked at this from their side to see if they can sort out what is going on.
“charliegood” wrote:
We are not sure where the problem lies. We have been streaming live streams to the Roku that have latested hours. It is important that segment size is a consistent 10 seconds. For this to be possible the key frame interval must be multiple of 10 seconds (2, 2.5, 5…). If the segments sizes vary too much there could be an issue with the session timing out. Of course the session timing out does not necessarily indicate that the problem is with Wowza. Dnet, I think we have suggested that you increase the validSessionTimeout for the cupertinostreaming entry in conf/HTTPStreamers.xml. If you set this value to 50000 or more you should alleviate the problem of the stream timing out due to inconsistent segment sizes. Not sure if the Roku guys have looked at this from their side to see if they can sort out what is going on.
Charlie (The Wowza Guy)
charlie, good to see you patrolling these forums. i tried what you suggested “validSessionTimeout=50000” in the right section of HTTPStreamers.xml – and it stops streaming at the same spot still (18-minutes or so into video). sorry, but i’m still not sure what the problem is. btw, we are able to stream just fine to the ipad, iphone, ipod the exact same video.
if we do a LIVE stream using cupertinostreaming (HLS), it works just fine for a 1+ hour stream.
Thanks for the comments. The last suggestion from Wowza was to play with my encoding. I’m not sure what the magic formula is but still can’t Stream vids over 15 minutes or so in length. Thanks Steve on the progressive download suggestion. It’s the way to start out on this. Apparently the Roku’s video player will start playing progressive vids immediately. I thought you had to do true steaming for this to work on the Roku. Progressive download couldn’t be easier, aside from its limitations.
The Apple and IonCannon solutions are free. IonCannon is open source.
IonCannon does not follow the Apple pantos spec. It creates segments that are not of equal size and ignores key frames when segmenting which works with the iThings but causes random issues with the Roku. I assume the author understandably wrote and tested with the Apple devices and said “good enough”.
Does anyone have any more information or solution to this? We are using Wowza and our live streams always stops at 14 minutes of playing. I have played VOD files for 60 minutes, with no problems.
I have tried changing the wowza timeout to 50000. I set the iframes as same as the vod files.
We are also using Wowza and have not run into that issue. Are you streaming to the wowza server or is the wowza server just playing the file off the disk? We stream to wowza using RTMP from flash media encoder or UDP from our broadcast servers and have never had issue with timeouts.
We found why the player was timing out… We are using an XML file to populate the channel. We are pulling items from a database. In the LIVE section, we did not populate duration and standard. When we added data in those fields it never timed out
We are facing similar issue streaming from wowza, our setup is to play mp4 files from mounted S3 bucket as a LIVE application (simulated live feed). the stream plays very well for a while and then starts (between 10 to 30min) either rebuffering or stops. wowza access logs show events like(in order for roku)-- stop, destroy, disconnect, conect, create and play.
bbakernc, any more details of the XML file population with duration and standard will be helpfull.
We also have found that roku sometimes stops play HLS stream after 3-4 minutes.
And the most interesting that it stops only on good fast Internet connection. If the Internet connection more slow (or to the same Internet connected and plays video 2 or more Roku’s at the same time) it plays full video without problem.
Setting validSessionTimeout=250000 (in 10 times more than default value) makes it working also in 10 times longer (40 minutes). validSessionTimeout=2500000 makes it working more than 3 hours.
Looks like that on fast connection Roku can to buffer some big period of video and after that it doesn’t use connection to Wowza long time, so time goes out.
