I've got two for anyone who has a little spare time (yeah I know... who exactly has any spare time?)
The first is the one that I'd like to see solved the most. I'm a big fan of DI.fm and Sky.fm and long ago set up the webradio.fxd to point to many of their channels. I used the 24kbps AACplus streams because they were low bandwidth but sounded perfectly fine to me. About a month ago, they upgraded the streams first to 32kbps, then 40kbps. And now Freevo won't play the streams anymore. I did my research and found out that MPlayer is hanging up trying to figure out what type of decoder to use for the stream. It will decode the ICY info and display the current song, fill the cache to about 12% and then stall, searching through all the different decoder modules for something that works (and often going for MPEG video, spewing out plenty of errors and warnings). If I force the decoder with -demuxer aac, it lights up and plays without a hitch. Of course if I put that as part of the command line permanently, it breaks trying to play anything other than AAC audio. Here's the kicker: I captured part of the stream by WGETing the url. And if I try to play back the captured file, it plays perfectly with no extra command line parameters. So I've got this terrible feeling it's something in the way the server is presenting the stream. I haven't yet reached out to the powers that be at DI/Sky... but I'm tempted to see if they have any ideas. For the record, I'm using MPlayer 1.0rc2-4.3.2. I tried going to the latest snapshot a few months ago, but seeking in recorded MPEGs seemed really broken (grey screen, blocking and long lags in response) so I went back to 1.0rc2. Anyone have any ideas on this one? The second involves the podcast from National Public Radio's "Wait Wait... Don't Tell Me" show. It's the weirdest thing, without fail the playback stops about 10 minutes into the program. The exact time varies, but here's the truly bizarre part: It _always_ stops right on the break between segments of the show, as if there was some kind of metadata tag inside the MPEG indicating a break. If I restart the program (playing from the now-downloaded file) it plays without any issues, start to finish. I've also noticed that the displayed data is different from the first play and subsequent plays (I think the genre changes, among other things). If anyone wants to check that one out, the podcast URL is http://www.npr.org/rss/podcast.php?id=35. And while we're discussing the podcast plugin, is there any reason it needs to download the podcast and play back the file while it continues to download, rather than just plugging the URL directly into MPlayer to play? The apodcast plugin doesn't clean up after itself so it leaves the downloaded MP3s sitting in its directories (this is something I've been planning to address). It does allow an immediate playback of a podcast that has been downloaded, but once it disappears off the list, it pretty much becomes an orphaned file sitting in the file system. A cursory check seems to show the URL to the MP3 plays okay directly in MPlayer. That's all I got. Sorry to bring troubles to the table... the rest of Freevo is running fine! In fact, it's gotten so reliable at recording and playing back TV sometimes I have to remind myself it's not a commercial box. The GAF (girlfriend, not wife) is quite high although she does put up it hijacking the TV when I forget to reschedule recordings and we're watching something live. But that's the woes of digital cable and only one cable box. Cheers! James Springfield, OR USA ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ _______________________________________________ Freevo-users mailing list Freevo-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freevo-users
