[MPlayer-users] How to select a substream in Windows Media 9 streaming?

[Aleksey Sudakov]

Hello,

Looks like nowadays Windows Media streaming comes with multiple
substreams.

I am trying to view mms://vipmms.itele.fr/cpi_itele using mplayer and
unfortunately mplayer is only capable of playing 31 kbps stream (192x144
horrible picture) while Windows Media 9 Player could play the same
stream at 102 kbps (nice 288x216 picture).

"mplayer -v" reveals that the media 9 stream above contains
4 substreams, namely stream ID 1 - 16996 bps, ID 2 - 9013 bps, ID 3
89821 bps and finally stream ID 4 at 30549 bps. Windows Media Player
could figure out the best stream for available bandwidth (and could do
substream switching on the fly, but that's a different story). From my
research into different multi-substream streams it looks like mplayer
always pick stream ID 4 or the last substream (I am not sure for all
streams that I came up with have 4 substreams). Adding -vid doesn't help
at all (mplayer hangs on anything but -vid 4). Neither does -bandwidth
89821 (500 error from the server).

So how could I specify which substream to play in multi-stream media 9
stream?

Thanks,
Aleksey