Serviio

I have been using Serviio with 3 Roku sticks for a few years. Occasionally, (enough to be irritating) a Roku Media server App will be unable to see the Serviio media server.

Sometimes, all I have to do is exit the Roku app and retry to connect. Sometimes I have to reboot the Roku device to establish a connection. Sometimes I can stop and restart the Serviio service and reestablish the connection. And sometimes I need to reboot the PC Serviio is running on. It seems like there may be multiple causes effecting stability. I would like to find a means of making the environment more reliable and would appreciate any suggestions.

You can see the hardware in my signature. The PC running Serviio is on is 24x7 and provides file share/backup services for 3 PCs in my home. These services are rock solid, always available.

The problem with Roku is they currently don't seem to have anyone working on Roku Media Player, which is the only app that Serviio works with. They haven't made any meaningful updates for video playback in more than four years, and it's been over three years since it's received any update at all. I used to have an inside connection to Roku with the actual RMP developer, but since he retired about 7 years ago Roku has completely ignored problems with RMP. For example, you cannot pause, FF, rewind or resume playback for any media in a TS/M2TS container.

I have no doubt the problem is with the Roku, but even though I'm a beta tester with them they still have been ignoring RMP issues. That's the biggest reason I seldom use my Roku players for Serviio use and instead use an Nvidia Shield. This of course has the added benefit of supporting everything without transcoding as well as image based captions work.

Now that I'm retired, I was going to attempt to create a Serviio app for Roku devices, but I haven't really gotten started yet. Once I figure out the basic connectivity, I think I can get a working UI fairly fast. But I really haven't gotten started on the core code yet.

Thanks Dan. I wish you luck with your retirement project. Wish I could help.

If anyone has further ideas on the stability issue..

I believe I have a solution if anyone else is experiencing this problem.

I found DLNA servers periodically announce their presence on the network so that clients can locate them and connect using SSDP. The announce interval for Serviio defaults to 3 minutes.
For windows servers, it can be set in the user.vmoptions file (C:\Program Files\Serviio\config\ directory)

I have one line in the file..

-Dserviio.advertisementDuration=15

I started with 60 seconds and still had occasional problems with the Roku Media Player finding the server. Since setting it to 15, I have had no issues.

The 15 second interval is very short compared to other configurations I found online. I presume most MP clients use SSDP's M-SEARCH method to request servers to announce their presence. Perhaps RMP does not do this, or not reliably. It is also possible that Serviio does not respond to the M-SEARCH request. Since I have not noticed this issue with other DLNA clients on my network, I presume it is RMP.

Yeah, I'm sure it's RMP. Roku hasn't put any real effort into that app for close to five years, and even now there doesn't seem to be any real support for it. I remain hopeful that they will resume some serious effort in it, but who knows.

My effort to create a Serviio app for Roku is on hold for a while. A good friend is starting up a new church, and I'm acting as his tech director. Right now I'm knee deep in getting all of the sound equipment set up and configured, and it's taking pretty much all of my time. We're shooting for a first service on Easter, and that's only four weeks away. Lots to do!