Re: playing internet radio streams in OS/2 and eCS

me@xxxxxxxxxxx wrote:
I am having issues getting internet radio streams to play acceptably under
eCS. I am currently using mplayer 4.4.0 to play the streams, but it
sputters quite a bit. It also hangs while playing, forcing me to break it
and restart it when that happens. I tried to use mplayer 4.4.2, but
shortly after starting to play it goes off with continuous error messages,
despite the -quiet option on the command line, and forces me to kill it as
it hogs system resources badly at that point.

I have also tried the vlc 1.0.5 beta1, but I can't get any interface other
than the "dummy" one to work, which leaves me with no controls I can find,
and while it will start to play it soon crashes as well.

Here is a sample stream if you want to try another player on it:

http://provisioning.streamtheworld.com/pls/WABCAMAAC.pls

This returns a playlist, so with mplayer you need to prefix it with the
-playlist option. From the mplayer output this appears to be an AAC
stream, althought mplayer 4.4.0 complains about things with it.

I guess it is possible that some of this is specific to my system, but
given the continuous stream of errors with 4.4.2 I suspect it is more
likely to be unsupported "new features" in the stream that need to be
added to the OS/2 - eCS mplayer. I can play these streams with no
difficulty using vlc under linux, but as I am on the road that is not a
current option.


I tried your above stream with MPlayer SVN-r32345-4.4.4 (C) 2000-2010 MPlayer Team, the tip of the development branch (compiled locally). It seemed to play fine but as it uses more bandwidth then I have, after the cache emptied it had problems. Apparently the AAC stream is missing a syncword so problems resyncing. It is possible that the syncing problems was just due to my slow dial-up connection.
Hopefully there will be a fresh build soon.
Dave
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