[MPlayer-users] Audio gets out of sync while playing network streams

[Aleksey Sudakov]

Hello,

Mplayer has a lot of problems playing various video streams.

The first and most obvious is that audio and video gets out of sync.
Sometimes, but not always this could be fixed by forcing the playback rate
by doing -fps 15 or 25 or whatever, but some streams out there seems to be
variable rate, so forcing fps doesn't work for them. A good example of such
streams are Bloomberg feeds like
http://www.bloomberg.com/streams/video/LiveBTV200.asxx
or
http://www.bloomberg.com/streams/video/LiveFR_nb.asxx
or
http://www.bloomberg.com/streams/video/LiveDE_nb.asxx
I don't know enough of different streams on a developer level and would
appreciate some insight, but similar problem exist with both asf and rtsp
streams. RealMedia streams that have same problem are France 2/3 news
streams like
rtsp://rmedia.francetv.fr:554/infos/f2/20h/20h_20040107.rm
or
rtsp://rmedia.francetv.fr:554/infos/f3/soir3/soir3_070104.rm

The bigger problem is that playback of network streams usually suck - I am
sorry for bringing it straight and no offence for I would rather use mplayer
then Windows player, but this is how it is sometimes - the quality of the
picture is a lot worse then with Windows player and it is not a sync issue,
however it is somewhere related to it. There is Russian TV (RTR) stream
http://video.rfn.ru/rtr-planeta that I believe currently is down. Well,
mplayer couldn't figure out fps out of the box and as a result (apart from
video/audio out of sync issue) the picture was "jittery" and nothing close
to what Windows Player was producing. Once I fixed the fps to 24 (I believe
but not sure) both the sound got in sync and the picture become as smooth as
on Windows.

So all in all it boils down to a problem of mplayer not being able to decode
network streams fps properly. Any idea why and most importantly how to fix
that?

Regards,
Aleksey