[MPlayer-users] Graceful failure when listening to a stream

[Joey Parrish]

On 4/17/07, Walter Belhaven <wbelhaven at yahoo.com> wrote:
> --- "info at danielerossi.net" <info at danielerossi.net> wrote:
> > > I'm using mplayer, rather successfully in most cases, to
> > > record streamed audio files, using the -ao pcm options.
> > > But, unfortunately, mplayer is not failing "gracefully" when
> > > the audio stream is interrupted due to net congestion,
> > > server problems, or otherwise.  Ideally, if the stream is
> > > interrupted for some number of seconds, I'd like mplayer to
> > > just give up, close the PCM (.wav) file, and exit.
> >
> > normally I use -dumpstream option and after I run a second
> > instance of Mplayer to listen _*or *_convert. The time between
> > my first and second command line act as a cache. You can write
> > a simple two line script for that.
> > It never fails.
> > Otherwise you can use the -cache otpion like "-cache 8192".
> > daniele
>
> Thanks Daniele and Joey.  Is "-dumpstream" materially different than
> "-ao pcm", especially with respect to mplayer hanging when the stream
> gets interrupted for any significant amount of time?  I ran some
> experiments and couldn't really tell a difference.  After interrupting
> the stream for a minute or so, the "-dumpstream" mplayer never
> reconnected with the server and, therefore, never continued writing to
> stream.dump.  Nor did it give up and exit.  I pulled the Ethernet cable
> between my router and modem to simulate a "long" interruption, though
> perhaps that's an invalid test.  Any more thoughts on this?  Any way to
> tell mplayer to aggressively attempt to reconnect when there's a
> disruption? -- or to just quit when it can't reconnect?

I think we're talking across purposes.  The -dumpstream option is
intended to dump the raw data from the network to the disk.  Then you
take a second pass with -ao pcm on the dumped data to convert to wav.
This doesn't solve the connection issues.  It just moves them away
from -ao pcm.  :)  It seems that isn't what you want, though.

Sorry,
--Joey