[MPlayer-users] Difficulties and quality problem with Windows Media

[Tony Houghton]

My friends recently played a gig at a pub which made a Windows Media
video stream available. By poking around in the links etc I found a
mms:// URL which works in MPlayer. The picture went blank after a couple
of songs, but the sound works all the way through, so I thought I could
at least try to extract the sound into a format that I can play
standalone. I seem to have succeeded at last, but I had a lot of
trouble, so I think it's worth describing it here, so perhaps things can
be improved.

For reference, the codecs for the clip are:

VIDEO:  [WMV2]  160x120  24bpp
[V] filefmt:6  fourcc:0x32564D57  size:160x120  fps:1000.00
ftime:=0.0010
...
Detected audio codec: [divx] drv:4 (DivX audio (WMA))
Selecting Audio Decoder: [acm] Win32 ACM audio decoder
fs seg 0x40688000
Loading DLL: 'divxa32.acm'
AUDIO: srate=11025  chans=1  bps=2  sfmt=0x10  ratio: 1271->22050

For a start, it would be nice to have a local copy of the clip, so I
tried mencoder -oac copy -ovc copy, but it hasn't reproduced it
faithfully. If I try to play it in MPlayer the sound disappears after a
couple of seconds, and Windows Media Player complains it can't find the
specified file - but Explorer can make a thumbnail from the first frame
OK. Weird. Would it be possible to have a simple option to just create
a working offline file from an online stream?

I tried using vsound on the original stream, but it failed. Vsound
preloads a library which intercepts open on /dev/dsp and saves the data
sent to it to a file; AFAICT from its debugging messages, mplayer wasn't
opening /dev/dsp. I do use OSS, not ALSA.

Although mplayer can't play the sound and video together in the file I
saved earlier, it does still seem to be possible to extract the sound
separately. I used mencoder -oac pcm, then mplayer -dumpaudio on the
result, and by noting down what mplayer said about the audio stream, I
managed to get it to play properly with sox. mplayer did claim to have
dumped core when it got to the end of the file though. An option to give
the data a wav header (eg -oac wav) would be very useful.

Finally, when playing what video there is from the original clip, which
isn't very good quality anyway, I thought it looked much, much worse in
mplayer than in Windows Media Player. Are some output drivers much
better than others? I'm using the default, but below is what I've got
available at the moment. I should be able to work out how to enable the
missing ones. Are some much better quality than others?

  Enabled optional drivers:
    Input: network tv dvdnav dvdread vcd 
    Codecs: divx4linux libavcodec xanim directshow win32 
    Audio output: oss 
    Video output: xvidix vesa png mpegpes(file) fbdev dga xv x11 
  Disabled optional drivers:
    Input: tv-v4l tv-bsdbt848 dvdcss 
    Codecs: xvid 
    Audio output: sgi sun alsa nas sdl 
    Video output: zr dxr3 sdl jpeg svga aa ggi xmga mga opengl directfb
tdfxfb 3dfx 

-- 
TH * http://www.realh.co.uk