[MPlayer-users] Recording .ram audio. -endpos doesn't work, -dumpfile file format.

[Stroller]

Hi there,

I've recently realised how pleasant it would be to record some of  
Radio 1's shows on a Saturday night and burn them to CD so I can  
listen to them in the car during the week.

To this end this command works great:
    mplayer -noframedrop -playlist http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio1/realaudio/media/r1live.ram 
  -dumpstream -dumpfile file.rm

(full output later)

And to convert that to .wav, this command works pefectly:
    mplayer -vo null -ao pcm:file=target.wav file.rm


Two questions, however:

1) I can't seem to get "-endpos" to work.

Neither:
   mplayer -noframedrop  -playlist http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio1/realaudio/media/r1live.ram 
   -dumpstream  -dumpfilempfile file.rm  -endpos 60
Nor:
   mplayer  -endpos 60 -noframedrop  -playlist http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio1/realaudio/media/r1live.ram 
   -dumpstream  -dumpfilempfile file.rm

In both cases mplayer continues running until I press ctrl-C, and the  
recording length is about that of the time elapsed. I want to record  
the whole show and stop after c 2 hours; I would expect that "-endpos"  
would allow me to do so with a single command in crontab.

Am I doing something wrong (putting this parameter in the incorrect  
position?) or is this a quirk of RealAudo / RealPlayer / the .ram  
stream format?

If I can't get "-endpos" to work then I guess I'll have to write a  
wrapper script, get the pid of the mplayer process, sleep for 2 hours  
and then kill it.



2) Is there any way to playback the dumped-stream in Realplayer on  
other platforms? Without converting it, I mean.

I obviously need to convert to .wav in order to burn the audio as a  
standard CD, but it would be nice also to keep an archive of all the  
recorded shows on hard-disk. The .wav file is about 20x larger than  
the dumped stream from the .ram playlist, so it would save space to  
keep only the dumped file.

I would like just to be able to double-click on the file on my Mac and  
have it play back, but Realplayer on the Mac (Version 11.0.0 (884))  
doesn't recognise the file. It _seems_ to load the  
"ID_CLIP_INFO_VALUE0=BBC Radio 1" metadata (because the player shows  
"BBC Radio 1" in the titlebar), but it just halts at 0:00 without  
playing any audio. I have tried changing the extension from "file.rm"  
to "file.ram" but this makes no difference and I don't know what else  
to try.

Obviously I could convert to MP3 to save space, but this may be lossy.  
I would prefer to keep the original compressed-audio format for "best  
possible" audio quality. Perhaps there is some additional step  
required to extract the original audio from the file and wrap it in  
some other common container?


Thanks in advance for any suggestions,

Stroller.



Full mplayer output when recording:

$ mplayer -noframedrop -playlist http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio1/realaudio/media/r1live.ram 
  -dumpstream -dumpfile file.rm
MPlayer dev-SVN-r27725-4.1.2 (C) 2000-2008 MPlayer Team
CPU: Intel(R) Pentium(R) 4 CPU 2.40GHz (Family: 15, Model: 2,  
Stepping: 7)
CPUflags:  MMX: 1 MMX2: 1 3DNow: 0 3DNow2: 0 SSE: 1 SSE2: 1
Compiled for x86 CPU with extensions: MMX MMX2 SSE SSE2
Resolving www.bbc.co.uk for AF_INET...
Connecting to server www.bbc.co.uk[212.58.251.216]: 80...
Cache size set to 320 KBytes

Playing rtsp://rmlive.bbc.co.uk/bbc-rbs/rmlive/ev7/live24/radio1/live/r1_dsat_g2.ra?BBC-UID=f44951680d3db5cef5141470c0c087bda9f33b0a0050f114347f79f78d3641cf_n&SSO2-UID= 
.
Resolving rmlive.bbc.co.uk for AF_INET...
Connecting to server rmlive.bbc.co.uk[212.58.227.82]: 554...
Cache size set to 320 KBytes


MPlayer interrupted by signal 2 in module: dumpstream
rtsp: read error.
Core dumped ;)

Exiting... (End of file)
$ file file.rm
file.rm: RealMedia file
$ mplayer -really-quiet -ao null -vo null -frames 0 -identify file.rm  
ID_AUDIO_ID=0
ID_CLIP_INFO_NAME0=name
ID_CLIP_INFO_VALUE0=BBC Radio 1
ID_CLIP_INFO_NAME1=author
ID_CLIP_INFO_VALUE1=BBC
ID_CLIP_INFO_NAME2=copyright
ID_CLIP_INFO_VALUE2=(C) British Broadcasting Corporation 2008
ID_CLIP_INFO_N=3
ID_FILENAME=file.rm
ID_DEMUXER=real
ID_AUDIO_FORMAT=cook
ID_AUDIO_BITRATE=0
ID_AUDIO_RATE=44100
ID_AUDIO_NCH=2
ID_LENGTH=0.00
ID_SEEKABLE=1
ID_CHAPTERS=0
ID_AUDIO_BITRATE=64080
ID_AUDIO_RATE=44100
ID_AUDIO_NCH=2
ID_AUDIO_CODEC=ffcook
$