[MPlayer-users] Re: BUG - Garbled output playing realaudio

[Neil Sleightholm]

Bryan Alton wrote:

> On a number of time I've had problems with r1 & R4 datastreams
> totally collapsing either late at night or early morning and Mplayer
> had to be restarted to get any output. I'm thinking of running
> Ethereal in the background to see what is going on however I need to
> be listening all the time to know where to search in the log and I
> don't have that time.
> 
> In the meantime I have Radio1 running with added messages and while
> there are loads of error - it keeps playing.  I have a theory that
> packet loss is not load related but related to complexity of the
> sound in the live broadcast and the server can't compress the sound
> in time as it is live.

I think you might be right about the stream colasping - I think I may
have been too keen to stop the mplayer. I believe the worst time for
Radio 4 is during the Archers - I left it running during tonight's
edition and when I returned it was still running ok. The other problem
time is Radio 1's Chris Moyles show. As both of these are the most
popular BBC downloads I suspect it is load related. I think your idea
about the BBC servers not keeping up sounds possible as I have never
had any problems with listen again stream.

I work from home quite a bit so I could run an ethereal trace and note
any problems. I there anything specific you would need in the trace?

Neil