4 ms·

Because the IP address the Roku is trying to reach is an IPv4 address. You can't just translate that to IPv6 and say "good luck little packet". If you translat

Because the IP address the Roku is trying to reach is an IPv4 address. You can't just translate that to IPv6 and say "good luck little packet". If you translate at the customers router that's fine and all, but now you have an IPv4 packet in an IPv6 packet, that IPv6 packet needs to get routed to a device that knows how to then turn it back into an IPv4 packet so that it can then go travel on the open internet like the electrons intended... Once that IPv4 response come back, it needs to get translated back to IPv6, sent to the customers edge, which translates it back from IPv6 to IPv4 to send to the Roku device.

brokencode 4y ago
Oh, what a mess. I don’t like that at all. I was assuming that there was some way to translate the IPv4 address of the server to an IPv6 one and process it that way, putting the burden of supporting IPv6 on the server side. I had no idea that Roku would actually need to be exposing an IPv4 server to handle these requests. That makes sense then that the ISP would need some number of IPv4 addresses that it could use to communicate with IPv4 servers on behalf of IPv4 client devices. Shame on Roku for perpetuating this problem.
- makomk 4y ago
  The more usual reason why devices would be making an IPv4 request despite having an IPv6-supporting connection is precisely because the server doesn't support IPv6 - either the network it's on doesn't support it, or it's not configured for it, or more rarely the software on the other end doesn't have IPv6 support. The request can't just be translated into an IPv6 one because there's no way of knowing that the server even understands that, let alone what its associated IPv6 address is.