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

[Reimar Döffinger]

HI,
On Sun, Jan 09, 2005 at 10:44:45PM +0100, Anders Lind wrote:
> søn, 09 01 2005 kl. 20:08 +0100, skrev Reimar Döffinger:
> > > 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!
> 
> Please look later in this post about whether it is wmav2 or wmav3.
> 
> > > 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.
> 
> Could it be that the entire .asx-file is transmitted (via some library
> call?) to the wma9dmod.dll and the dll then determines the right
> options/settings. Or that the player have to specify some (extra)
> options to wma9dmod.dll. What I mean is that the header of the .asx-file
> is (I do not know if 'ASX Version = "3.0"' triggers anything in Windows
> Media Player 9+ or not?):

no, as I stated in my reply, the decoder has nothing, rien, nada to do
with it! WMP interprets the "?wmcontentbitrate=40000" as "select a
stream with a maximum bitrate of 40000". It then feeds the stream it
receives to the decoder, but it doesn't have anything to do with the
transport over the network, bandwidth selection etc.

> (doesn't matter whether or not I append '?wmcontentbitrate=300000' to

MPlayer does not interpret/parse that part. And it should not. Unlike
Microsoft our goal is not to write the most obfuscated player on earth
(TM).

> > > 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://
> 
> All the links are http:// but thanks for reminding!

Yes, but reading properly clearly would help:
Solution: Use latest CVS of MPlayer. <--- !!!
Fixing this was a major operation and thus wasn't done directly
before the release but after instead.

> > > 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.
> 
> I use the Debian version of Kaffeine 0.5-rc2 (Under KDE 3.3.1) and it is
> not fixed. So unless there is an option for specifiing specific decoder
> details as the decoder and options, I do not know them (I cant find any
> in the Experts options in the Xine parameters for Kaffeine).

No idea what xine version this is based on. I think it _should_ work
with xinelib 1.0.

> So what is your point of view to all this regarding MBR, the streams,
> your fix (what did it fix) etc.?

mms-over-http should work perfectly (with _CVS_ version). mms:// still
doesn't, and I don't know if/when it will be fixed.

Greetings,
Reimar Döffinger