[MPlayer-users] unable to play Real Audio stream

[Roberto Togni]

On Sat, 22 Mar 2008 21:35:47 +1100
"Ross Gayler" <r.gayler at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi,
>  
> My apologies if this is a really dumb question.
>  
> I appear to be unable to play http://woub.org/radio/woublive.ram with
> MPlayer Sherpya-SVN-r58803-4.2.2 (with MPUI 1.2-pre3 build 38).
> This contains rtsp://media.woub.org/qtencoder/woubfmlive.sdp?title="WOUB-FM
> Live!"&author="WOUB Radio - woub.org"&copyright="2005 Ohio University"
>  
> The MPlayer output seems to suggest that it is being confused by the spaces
> in the query strings:
> Playing rtsp://media.woub.org/qtencoder/woubfmlive.sdp?title=WOUB-FM.
> Resolving media.woub.org for AF_INET...
> Connecting to server media.woub.org[198.234.121.103]: 554...
> Cache size set to 640 KBytes
>  
> REAL file format detected.
> Stream mimetype: audio/MPEG4-GENERIC
> demux_real: invalid chunksize! (0)
> No stream found.
>  
> 
> Playing Live!&author=WOUB.
> File not found: 'Live!&author=WOUB'
> Failed to open Live!&author=WOUB.
>  
> 
> Playing Radio.
> File not found: 'Radio'
> Failed to open Radio.
>  
> 
> Playing -.
> Reading from stdin...
> Cannot seek backward in linear streams!
> Seek failed
>  
> I guess this may be a malformed/nonstandard rtsp URL, but Real Player is
> able to play this OK.
>  
> Any suggestions as to how I can work around this?
>  
> Thanks
>  

This is not realaudio over realrtsp, this is a standard rtsp stream
(AAC codec, but that's irrelevant here) streamed by a Real server.

Everything coming from a Real server is taken by the realrtsp module,
but realrtsp code can't play standard rtsp (and standard rtsp module
can't play realaudio/realvideo).

There is no easy solution for this. At the moment MPlayer can detect a
Real server in two ways: the "RealChallenge1" string (user for
realplayer authentication) or the server name "Real" or "Helix". The
server name check is what is causing the problem on your url.
I'll check if I can drop that check, or add a parameter to force using
standard rtsp.


This won't fix the playback in this case, but you're not calling
MPlayer in the right way here. If you want to use the .ram file you
need the playlist option

mplayer -playlist http://woub.org/radio/woublive.ram

If you pass the rstp url directly you must be careful with escaping,
since it contains ? and ", so you have to do 

mplayer -v
'rtsp://media.woub.org/qtencoder/woubfmlive.sdp?title="WOUB-FM
Live!"&author="WOUB Radio - woub.org"&copyright="2005 Ohio University"'


BTW to play standard rtsp you need to install the live555 library.


If you want to play that stream, you can do a quick workaround: in file
stream/librtsp/rtsp_session.c change the two #define
RTSP_SERVER_TYPE_REAL and RTSP_SERVER_TYPE_HELIX to something that will
never match (eg. change "Real" to "UnReal" ;) ) and recomplile


Ciao,
 Roberto

-- 
Better is the enemy of good enough.