[MPlayer-users] Trouble with radio audio streams encoded in WMA9 (WMAv3)

[Reimar Döffinger]

Hi,
> When listening to the national radio station in Denmark ( DR - Danmarks
> Radio ), you have to use WMA9 (WMAv3 as I understand the name of the
> codec is called.)

The one I tried (http://wmsc.dr.dk/e02ch01m?wmcontentbitrate=300000) is
wmav2, which can be decoded with ffmpeg's decoder (it is somtimes buggy,
but at least in this case it works). You should better
give a direct link to a sample next time!

> However, I guess a lot of other people could be getting into the same
> trouble in the future as well when more stations start to use WMA9
> (WMAv3).
> 
> The problem is that unless you use Microsofts Media Player 9+ you will
> only hear the stream in 20 Kbit/s even though you choose a stream of
> either 64Kbps, 32Kbps or 20 Kbps.

That's because they all stream the same file, only the
wmcontentbitrate=28000 at the end seems to tell WMP which stream in it
to request and play.

> Danmarks Radio knows of this problem, but they do not know, what to do
> about the problem as it seems when I read threads from other people on
> the net. So that's kind of bad.

Not use wma/asf ;-). And least it would be good if they stayed with
wmav2 and do not upgrade to v3, as there is an opensource decoder for v2
that works on all architectures whereas v3 will only work on x86...

> Please visit for the links:
> http://www.dr.dk/netradio/netradiohelp_direkte.shtml
> 
> So here is what I have tried to make it work, but without any luck:

Solution: Use latest CVS of MPlayer. And if the URL is of the type
mms:// replace that by http://

> 2. So then I tried to fiddle with /etc/mplayer/codecs.conf

Can't help as it's not caused by the decoder. Can't be, because if the
decoder could make a difference, you would always have to transmit all
the data over the network. Makes sense, doesn't it? ;-)

> 3. Finally i tried as well with Kaffeine (That utilizes Xine as I
> understand it) but also here the result was 20 Kbps, but I understand
> that Xine and MPlayer share code (for good obvious reasons :) ), so that
> might be the reason???

I thought they fixed it short time ago although in a different way...
If you are really sure they didn't, tell me, I will then contact them
and give some hints how I fixed it for MPlayer...
For network things VLC might actually be best btw.

Greetings,
Reimar Döffinger