[MPlayer-users] "-frames" option for streamed audio stopped "counting"

[Woody Suwalski]

Giacomo Comes wrote:
> On Thu, Jan 04, 2007 at 10:10:32AM -0500, Woody Suwalski wrote:
>   
>> I used to be able to record streamed audio clips, specifying number of 
>> frames to record, then quit...
>>
>> With current mplayer (1.0-pre8-0.1sarge2 from 
>> http://www.debian-multimedia.org) the "-frames nn" option stopped 
>> quiting - keeps playing (i.e. recording) for ever....
>>
>> Is it the updated codec issue? The source build issue? A genuine bug?
>>
>> e.g.
>> mplayer -frames 99 -novideo -srate 11025 -channels 1 -quiet -vc dummy 
>> -vo null -ao pcm:file=/tmp/cfra.wav mms://tc1.canadacast.ca/chum/cfra.wmv
>> used to record ~ 5 minutes of WAV file...
>>
>>     
> The way of how -frames works has changed since pre8. Before -frames was counting
> the input frames, now it counts the output frames.
> By accident -frames was working before with pure audio stream, but now it
> does not work anymore because with an audio stream there are no output frames
> generated.
> This is more or less the non expert explanation. There is, of course, a better one,
> but the result wont change.
>
> May be you can have more luck with -endpos, but I haven't tested it.
>
> Ciao.
> Giacomo
>
>   
Right, good explanation since it supports the facts ;-)

However, -endpos is applicable only to the mencoder.

What would be a way to stop the mplayer after a prescribed amount of 
time? I was running it unattended from cron doing recordings 
automatically...
It needs to be able to stop sucking the stream after some time !!!

Thanks, Woody