Let's brainstorm..Setting up MinimServer to feed a USB DAC

[PeteManchester]

(03-01-2014 14:13)classical11 Wrote:  Sorry, my previous post was quite confusing. Yes, that's exactly what I meant - MediaPlayer can play the link when it's initiated through Kinsky but not from BubbleDS.

I've described the problem to the BubbleDS developer and he's looking into it. He also suggested I try a different link, "http://streaming.radionz.co.nz/concert-mbr". This points to a file with the following contents:
[Reference]
Ref1=http://streaming.radionz.co.nz/concert-mbr?MSWMExt=.asf
Ref2=http://103.14.3.137:80/concert-mbr?MSWMExt=.asf

If I set the player to mpd in app.properties, I don't get an error when I try playing this radio station (with the new URL above) from BubbleDS but the stream stops very quickly. The log shows the status changing from Buffering to Playing to Stopped very quickly.

If I change the player to mplayer, it works but it takes forever to buffer the stream (over a minute). I need to figure out how to configure mplayer to reduce the buffering.

I need to experiment with mpd & mplayer from the command line to understand them better. (I haven't even figured out yet how to play using mpd from the command line.)

But I feel I am really close to getting it working..

Cheers,
Ciprian

Hi Ciprian,

I tried the link "http://streaming.radionz.co.nz/concert-mbr" yesterday, but the problem is that the contents of the .asx file refer back to itself and so I end up with another .asx file which MPD can't play.

Code:

[Reference]
[Reference]
Ref1=http://streaming.radionz.co.nz/concert-mbr?MSWMExt=.asf
Ref2=http://103.14.3.137:80/concert-mbr?MSWMExt=.asf

When using MPD in MediaPlayer I have to parse all the radio links to get the stream to pass to MPD, at the moment I cannot figure out how to parse the Radio NZ Concert stream because it always refers back to itself. There must a way because mplayer and Foobar will play the url.

The big advantage of mplayer is that you can pass it almost any url stream and it will play it, with MPD I have to parse the url first. But MPD handles gapless playback very well.

There are some otpions in MediaPlayer to change the caching of mplayer

Code:

mplayer.cache    The size of the cache mplayer will try to maintain    
mplayer.cache_min    The minimum size in percent of cache that mplayer will fill before playing the stream

Also from the command line you can change the cache settings of mplayer using

Code:

-cache-min <percentage>
-cache <kBytes>

MPlayer Options

To control MPD from the command line you will need to install mpc or a similar client.

Cheers,

Pete