Serviio

I've spent hours trying to make this work. I dunno why it has to be so complicated.

I have window 8 on my pc. I can play any video perfectly fine with mpc/hc or vlc.

I have roku hdmi stick on tv. I can hardly play anything right. Since I've owned this thing, I've had one video play right, it had aac audio (according to vlc on my pc).

With default settings, some videos wouldn't play audio. For sure, avi with mp3 audio won't play audio.

I've read forusm for a while, tried messing with profiles.xml, putting in many suggested roku profiles, rebooted my computer about 1000 times, reinstalled servi9oo at least ten times when I get weird errors about not running, but nothing makes it better. In fact, every single thing I've tried has made it worse - it no longer lists those videos it can't play audio on at all when viewing from my tv/roku hdmi stick.

Can someone provide me a complete profiles.xml, or at least the section for roku that actually works? i'm jsut trying to use this on a simple stereo tv without surround, I assume regular mp3 audio should work! (With english srt/etc subtitles) If ac3/dts audio work too that's a bonus, but I'm not even at that point. I Just want to play avi with mp3 for now.... (mkv/mp4 with mp3/aac/ac3/dts would be great in the future too.. but for now just plain ole avi with mp3 would be great).

Cheers, thanks, peace, love.

I don't know if Roku changed anything for the stick, as far as supported file formats goes. My Roku 2 XS plays perfectly with the standard Roku Media Player profile, although I have tweaked mine to better support some audio functionality.

The Roku has limited native support for video over DLNA. Only three containers will play native (HLS, sometimes called AppleHTTP, MPEG-TS and MP4), and the video codec must be H264. Practically all my videos are in MKV containers, so they all need transcoding. I had better luck transcoding them to MPEG-TS than HLS, and that is what the default Roku profile uses.

For audio, the Roku supports AC-3 (Dolby Digital), AAC and MP3. It will pass-through AC-3 and DTS if you are using HDMI (not a problem when you are using the Roku Stick), and that's the tweak I made for my profile, to allow the native audio to pass. If your files have HD audio (DTS Master Audio or Dolby TrueHD) they must transcode the audio, as these will not pass-through. If you are plugging the Roku Stick directly into your TV, then there's no sense using any audio other than AC-3, as I know of no TV that supports DTS audio. In fact, that may be why your MP3 audio files won't play. The TV itself has to support the audio you are sending it, although I thought all TVs would support MP3. Although if your TV is not a "smart" set, i.e. having Internet connectivity, it my not support any audio but AC-3.

Is there a setting in the Roku Stick about audio output? I know mine does, and I use the Surround setting. If yours is set to surround, it may be sending all the audio through, instead of sending a straight stereo signal. You need to be set to Stereo.

I'm at work right now, so can't copy you my profile. However, like I said it worked just fine with the default Roku profile.

Thanks for reply.

Yes, there is a setting in roku stick for stereo vs. surround; I set for stereo.

Perhaps you're right about the tv not being able to play mp3... maybe I need to tell serviio to transcode the audio to ac3 or aac. The tv is a cheap 24" emerson, no internet or anything (which is why I got the roku hdmi stick for it).

Yeah, that's likely the issue. I doubt the TV will accept any audio but AC-3 over the HDMI input. Here's what Roku says for media support (using the Roku Media Player channel):

Video — MKV (H.264), MP4 (H.264), MOV (H.264), WMV (VC-1, firmware 3.1 only)

Music — AAC, MP3, WMA, FLAC (firmware 5.3 and later), WAV (firmware 5.3 and later)

Photo — JPG, PNG, GIF (non-animated)

The Roku will play MP3, but I don't know what it does at the output. If it is passing it through, it's likely your TV doesn't support it. In the Profiles.xml file, you will find the Roku profile near the end (line 2105 in my file). To set the transcoding output, find the first line after the <transcoding> tag. My line is currently


This line tells Serviio to send a file as a MPEG-TS container, using H.264 for video and Dolby Digital for the audio. The bitrate is necessary if you have any HD video, because the Roku can't handle a real high bitrate. Check your line for the same settings.

Here's my complete Transcoding section:



Because of the change I made for HD video and MPEG-2 MKV files, you have to have a newer version of FFMPEG on your computer. If you don't have any MKV files, nothing to worry about.

Thanks much!

For some reason every time I tried editing small sections of the profile myself, serviio wouldn't start... but when I cut & pasted your transcoding section in now everything I've tried works great. I also put newer ffmpeg in there as I do have some mkv, although haven't specifically tested them yet.

Oh, it doesn't take much to mess up an XML file . Just add or subtract one character and the whole thing goes kaput!

Glad it's working for you!