I'm a member of Woodstock Fire Department in upstate New York. Some of our members have trouble hearing Fire Dispatch through their pagers (audio radios) because the area is heavily wooded.
So I've been streaming the Fire Dispatch audio over the internet so members with bad radio reception can still hear the dispatch. They use whatever media player they want for their platform--iTunes, Windows Media Player, RealPlayer, etc. They all seem to work fine, but there is a problem with all of them. If I have to take the server down for any reason, the media playes promptly switch from play mode to stop mode. Unless the fire and rescue members look at the transport controls of their player, they won't know that it's changed from play to stop, since the radio dispatch occurs infrequently. Unlike streaming music, which is immediately noticeable when it stops, dispatch goes for long periods of time with no transmissions. To deal with this, I decided to build a cross-platform media player in Rev which would detect when the server was down and restart the player. Unfortunately, I'm having a few problems I didn't anticipate. (so far testing only in Mac OS 10.4) 1) I want to use my own controls to start and stop the player, rather than use the Quicktime controller. At first this worked fine. For some reason now it's not working at all. If I use the command <start player "stream"> the player says "connecting" but never does. However, if I click the start button on the controller, it connects fine. Why doesn't the start command work? (Is this related to bug 1239?) 2) In order to determine if the server is down, I need to tell if the player is receiving an audio stream. I've been using the currenttime to test this. I check to see if the currenttime changes over a 1 second interval. If it's the same, I assume the server has stopped. Sometimes, however, audio will stop playing while the currenttime goes on its merry way. I need a *reliable* way to tell if the player is receiving data from the stream. Does anyone have a suggestion for this? 3) Finally, the player seems to generate certain messages right in the player bar--things like "connecting", "negotiating", "connection failed", etc. Is there a way I can intercept these messages in Rev? Any help would be appreciated. -- Regards, Howard Bornstein ----------------------- www.designeq.com _______________________________________________ use-revolution mailing list use-revolution@lists.runrev.com Please visit this url to subscribe, unsubscribe and manage your subscription preferences: http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-revolution