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

[PeteManchester]

(06-01-2014 04:18)classical11 Wrote:  Hi Pete,

When MediaPlayer is configured with mpd and I'm using Kinsky to play the radio station using this URL, "mmsh://streaming.radionz.co.nz/concert-mbr?MSWWExt=.asf", it works. I'm not sure how you parse that to send it to mpd but it does the trick. Do you use the mmsh prefix to determine this is a Microsoft Media Server (MMS) stream? Or do you just pass it with the mmsh prefix to mpd?

When using the other URL, "http://streaming.radionz.co.nz/concert-mbr", which is an asx file containing this playlist:
[Reference]
Ref1=http://streaming.radionz.co.nz/concert-mbr?MSWMExt=.asf
Ref2=http://103.14.3.137:80/concert-mbr?MSWMExt=.asf

Could you not use the MSWWExt parameter to work out the referenced URLs are also MMS streams because of the ASF container used? Then you could treat them the same as the first ("mmsh://...") URL.

From what I've read on the wiki about MMS,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Media_Server
if you specify the mms:// or mmsh:// to the the client (WMP in the example on the wiki), it will handle both RTSP and the older MMS protocol. So applying that prefix for ASF containers should hopefully handle both protocols.


Thanks for the info on mplayer. I will experiment with buffering soon.

But if I had a choice I would use mpd because (like you said) I also like the way mpd handles gapless!

(As a side note, I had a lot of trouble initially on my Ubuntu PC getting mpd to play nicely with pulseaudio but it works fine now. On the raspberry pi I just use alsa and never had any problems.)

Cheers,
Ciprian

Hi Ciprian,

I've updated MediaPlayer so that if the ContentType is 'VIDEO/X-MS-ASF' and if the url from the .asx file ends with 'MSWMEXT=.ASF' and begins with 'http' then I replace 'http' with 'mmsh'.

It seems to work and does not impact the existing radio streams so let's try that.

The new mediaplayer is in the beta/builds directory.

I'm still not convinced that is the correct approach though..

In the case of using the URL "http://streaming.radionz.co.nz/concert-mbr"

I get the .asx file which contains

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

But I cannot see anything that suggests the "MSWMExt=.asf" part means I should replace "http://" with "mmsh://"

Quote:Client programs sometimes use a file name extension or a MIME type to determine whether to render a media file as a stream, render the file after a full download, or refuse to render the file at all. If a client program cannot determine how to treat a media file based on the file name extension or the MIME type, it can determine how to treat the file by inspecting the MSWMExt parameter. For example, the client could treat the file as if it had an extension equal to the value of the MSWMExt parameter. For more information about MIME types and file name extensions, see File Name Extensions. For more information about the MSWMExt parameter, see article 236895 in the Microsoft Knowledge Base.

Quote:.asf video/x-ms-asf Legacy content. Typically used to download and play files or to stream content. May contain audio and/or video content. Typically used to download and play files or to stream content.

In the case of using the URL "mmsh://streaming.radionz.co.nz/concert-mbr?MSWWExt=.asf", in my parsing routine I don't recognize that as needing any parsing and so just pass the URL to MPD or MPlayer.

Let me know how that goes and if you find any other radio streams that do not work..

Cheers,

Pete.