[vdr] Re: streamig with mplayer?

[Dave Chapman <dave@dchapman.com>]

On Friday 02 August 2002 07:54, a.schinkel@vosschemie.de wrote:
> hi people!
> 
> got 2 questions today :-) 
> 
> 1st thing is: i want to stream some radio over the lan. i chose a
> radiostation, push streaming in the menu... 
> if i point mplayer to the stream "mplayer -vo null rtp://224.0.1.2:5002" it
> fills it cache and aborts with "stream doesn´t contain video data" or
> something like that (which is in fact true but i just want to hear the
> sound). 

Are you using the very latest CVS version of mplayer?  This may be fixed in 
the latest versions - with older versions, it refused to play audio-only 
"ASF" files, but the current version can now play them.

> if i point freeamp or mplay to that url, i can hear the stream, but
> there are short gaps inbetween, like there seems to be something else in
> it.. the same thing is, if i record the stream on harddisc and try to play
> the vdr file, it plays but with gaps.. sounds terrible. same thing with
> different stations.. maybe i configured something wrong?!

VDR streams data in "PES" (Packetised Elementary Stream) format.  Freeamp 
expects data in ES format.  The short gaps are Freeamp trying to interpret 
the PES headers as audio data.

I haven't tested this, but you could try the following command-line:

dumprtp | pes2aud_es | mpg123 -

Where:

dumprtp is from my dvbstream application (http://www.linuxstb.org)
pes2aud_es is from the "apps/mpegtools" directory of the DVB driver

You may need to edit dumprtp.c by hand to make sure it is using the correct 
multicast address and port.

However, the real solution would be to patch VDR so that for Radio stations, 
it streams a single elementary stream, instead of a PES stream.  The 
pes2aud_es conversion is very straightforward.

Dave.