[MPlayer-dev-eng] [wigren at home.se: [PATCH] Selectable User-Agent for HTTP transfers]

[Dominik 'Rathann' Mierzejewski]

On Wednesday, 15 October 2003, Gabucino wrote:
[...] 
> This patch adds the option -user-agent for HTTP-streaming. It is needed 
> for the 100s of radiostations hosted by http://www.surfernetwork.com and 
> I'm sure there are others.
> A bunch of the SurferNetwork's stations can be found at 
> http://www.web-radio.com, the symbol "(SN)".  SN uses a custom player 
> which uses encrypted streams, but reading the information they say they 
> also support iTunes on MacOS.. After some investigation I found that you 
> get an unencrypted MP3-stream if you connect to 
> http://rd1.surfernetwork.com:443/call-id/bitrate and send the header 
> "User-Agent: iTunes/4.0 (Macintosh; N; PPC)".
> 
> Apply this patch and you can listen to the streams like this:
> $ mplayer http://rd1.surfernetwork.com:443/buzz/24 -user-agent 
> "iTunes/4.0 (Macintosh; N; PPC)"
> for the station with call-id "buzz", bitrate 24.
> 
> I hope to see this in 1.0! It's a very small and simple patch and may be 
> needed for more streams than SN's!

I also propose to have a few predefined UAs to make life easier for people
who don't understand this concept and don't really need to - they can be
told to try this and this and if it doesn't help, _then_ worry, because
most often, one of these will work: RealPlayer (or RealOne),
MSIE/Mozilla/Opera and the aforementioned iTunes. Does WMP have its own
UA string, too?

Does this idea sound sensible?

-- 
MPlayer RPMs maintainer: http://www.piorunek.pl/~dominik/linux/pkgs/mplayer/
"The Universe doesn't give you any points for doing things that are easy."
        -- Sheridan to Garibaldi in Babylon 5:"The Geometry of Shadows"