[MPlayer-cygwin] Using mplayer with another app + problems with stdin

[Chhaya, Harshal]

Hi,

I had sent this to the 'mplayer-users' list but then realised
that this may be a better place for these questions. I apologise
for the duplication.

I just downloaded the latest mplayer binary for Windows 
(MPlayer-mingw32-1.0pre5.zip) and am planning to use it 
in a demo to show streaming video over a network.

My current approach is to open a pipe to mplayer (via popen()) 
and have an application read the incoming video stream from the 
driver. The application then writes the data to mplayer via fwrite().

Is there a better way to do this?

Also, this will require me to launch mplayer such that it reads from
stdin. But my initial attempt that using stdin as input isn't working.
For eg. 'mplayer file.mpg' works fine but 'mplayer - < file.mpg'
causes a error message that says:

   Reading from stdin...
   MPEG: Missing video stream!? Contact the author, it may be a bug :(

   Exiting... (End of file)

The documents and the manual both say that using '-' should work. Am
I missing any additional arguments?

Thanks for any help.

Regards,
Harshal