[MPlayer-users] pna stream on bbc not working

[Adrian Buciuman]

  Thanks, I've  known the pnm -> rtsp trick for a long time.


   (There are even some stream savers/downloaders for windows which
falsely claim that they support pnm streaming. But what many of them
do is to change the url prefix, and try rtsp/port 554 and maybe
rtsp/port 7070).

   It would be nice to add a tip in documentation and even in the
mplayer output about trying other protocols. But I don't think an
application developed primary for Unix systems should pretend it is
smarter than the user and automatically try other streaming protocols.
Depending on various firewall & nat configurations, connecting to a 
different remote port other may have undesirable effects, may end on a
diferent server streaming something else. Or imagine one  have a
paranoic network administrator which logs every connection if the
remote port is smaller than 1024. Now, I type mplayer pnm://blabla and
I hope that my network administrator will not catch me, because the
implicit port is 7070.  But mplayer will try to connect to
rtsp://blabla, it will use 554 as the remote port--bad luck indeed!!
Also imagine that for some reasons ports 512-1024 are forwarded to a
different server, so that pnm://blabla and rtsp://blabla will stream
from different machines. I like an application which doesn't try to be
smarter than me, and one which respects the principle of least
surprise.

   In the documentation I've seen  "-rtsp-stream-over-tcp (live.com
only)". I've first belived that for realmedia-rtsp streams tcp-only is
not supported, and udp is always used. I was wrong. All realmedia-rtsp
streams I've tested used tcp-only. (Beyond using rtsp/pnm over
tcp+udp, Realplayer also supports other options, like pnm/rtsp over
http, http/pnm/rtsp proxies, pnm/rtsp with multicast, using specific
upd ports. I've seen with ethereal it tries to initiate udp
connections from the client to the server in order to establish
connections through a firewall/nat.)

PS: How is correct? pnm stream or pna stream?? 

On Apr 2, 2005 3:40 AM, Stephen Stocker <lpar at par1.net> wrote:
> >Can you listen to this?
> >
> >pnm://rmv8.bbc.net.uk/romanian/rom.ra
> >
> >I can't.
> >
> >Instead I receive a lot of errors, including one asking me to update
> >RealPlayer(!!!)
> 
>  I just tried it, I get the same error:
> 
> ---
> I've had problems with their pnm streams before, but not sure what the problem is. However, if you change the "pnm" to "rtsp", it works for me. Hope this works for you.
> 
>        Take care,
>        Steve
>