NP30 plays AAC from BBC but not from Minimstreamer unless transcoded to MP3

[simoncn]

The URL you have found is a PLS "wrapper" for the URL I posted. Both these URLs correspond to the same legacy 320k AAC Radio 3 stream.

These URLs should return the same AAC audio data as the 320k HLS/MinimStreamer stream.The difference is how this audio data is packaged into an HTTP stream. Here are the HTTP headers from the BBC stream that plays:

Server: openresty/1.13.6.2
Date: Wed, 01 Mar 2023 20:17:40 GMT
Content-Type: audio/aacp
Transfer-Encoding: chunked
Connection: keep-alive
Cache-Control: no-cache, no-store
Expires: Mon, 26 Jul 1997 05:00:00 GMT
Pragma: no-cache
Access-Control-Allow-Origin: *
icy-br: 320
ice-audio-info: channels=2;samplerate=48000;bitrate=320
icy-br: 320
icy-pub: 1
Allow: GET, HEAD
icy-name: BBC Radio
icy-description: BBC Radio

and here are the HTTP headers from the HLS/MinimStreamer stream that does not play:

Date: Thu, 02 Mar 2023 09:54:29 GMT
Connection: close
Server: MinimStreamer
Content-Type: audio/aac

The main differences are:

1) The BBC AAC stream uses HTTP chunked encoding
2) The BBC AAC stream has a number of ICY headers (those with names starting icy- or ice-)

The HLS/MinimStreamer stream is working OK on all other renderers, so this is an issue with the NP30 and not with what MinimStreamer is sending.

[FakePlasticDunk]

That's weird. I wonder why the wrapped version played and the other didn't. Never mind, yes, I agree, I suspect CA did something specific to make the Radio 3 ICY AAC stream work on the NP30 rather than implementing general support for AAC live streams. Thanks for looking into it anyway.