What to use for unknown HLS stream quality?

Archived
1

Hello All, I’m using the default SDK settings for streamBitrate because I have no way of determining the actual bitrate;

SD
1500
http://HLS/live.m3u8

Taken from the HLS Troubleshooting thread;

5) If your HLS streams are less than 1.5 Mb/s, they may take very long in the preloading phase. Roku considers this a bug in the current firmware, but there is a workaround. Instead of setting content metadata StreamBitrates = [0] for your HLS stream, set it to the actual bandwidth of your stream when it is less than 1.5 Mb/s. Example for 900kbps stream: StreamBitrates = [900]
  1. What does the “0” setting do? 0 Does it allow the Roku to adjust Bitrate/quality according to streaming speed if the connection isn’t the greatest?
  2. Since I won’t also know if the user of my channel will have an SD or HD television, if I leave the setting at SD will this make it compatible with both television types but not degrade the quality on an HD TV?
2

“matrixebiz” wrote:
Hello All, I’m using the default SDK settings for streamBitrate because I have no way of determining the actual bitrate;

Taken from the HLS Troubleshooting thread;

5) If your HLS streams are less than 1.5 Mb/s, they may take very long in the preloading phase. Roku considers this a bug in the current firmware, but there is a workaround. Instead of setting content metadata StreamBitrates = [0] for your HLS stream, set it to the actual bandwidth of your stream when it is less than 1.5 Mb/s. Example for 900kbps stream: StreamBitrates = [900]
  1. What does the “0” setting do? Does it allow the Roku to adjust Bitrate/quality according to streaming speed if the connection isn’t the greatest?
  2. Since I won’t also know if the user of my channel will have an SD or HD television, if I leave the setting at will this make it compatible with both television types but not degrade the quality on an HD TV?

Hello,

Did you finally know what 0 means in the StreamBitrates part of the code ?

Thank you

3

No, I assume it means that it allows the Roku to be Adaptive

4

Hi matrixebiz and jamilou,

Just relaying information from RokuJoel and personal experience:

  1. The “0” setting tells the player to figure out what the bitrate is (adaptive) – it’s generally the recommended setting if your highest bitrate is over 1500 kbps. However, as noted in the HLS troubleshooting thread, you should set the stream bandwidth when < 1.5 mbps.
  2. I’m not sure how stream quality is handled, but in the manifest if you set “ui_resolutions=fhd” only then all scaling would be automatically handled (if your translations are for an FHD TV, they will automatically be scaled down so you only have to develop for FHD). I would assume that stream quality would follow the same logic. If you have a SD and HD TV I would test on both to make sure!