Encoding

A common cause of videos not playing on your streaming device is incorect encoding…

Encoding is how video or audio, moving pictures and sound, are converted into the 1s and 0s computers use to store data. You can imagine this is a little tricky… There are many different encodings out there! This is why the problem is so common - because there are so many different ways to encode things, something like a Roku will only implement a few.

The Roku supports a bunch… So if you have a video file that’s not supported by it you can change encodings to make a new video that’s compatible. YouTube videos seem to generally be encoded wrong.

One tool that makes changing encodings quick and easy is ffmpeg - downloadable here. If you’re on Linux, you can probably just install ffmpeg from your distribution.

With it installed, you can use this command to change to h264 encoding, which works well with Roku:

ffmpeg -i input_file.mp4 -c:v h264 output_file.m4v

You can use your webbrowser to convert files too - ffmpeg browser demo. Setting “Choose a sample config” to x264 (mp4) (the default) seems to produce acceptable results. Then click the red “upload a video/audio file” button, and wait. A large chunk of code downloads, then converts your video inside your browser, never leaving your computer. When conversion is complete it will display as a video - use the controls inside the video to download it. This is a slow process and may crash your browser if you don’t have enough RAM.