[MPlayer-users] Re: Mplayer crashing, streaming from "ASX" xml files

[D Richard Felker III]

On Sun, Mar 21, 2004 at 05:21:33PM -0500, The Wanderer wrote:
> adland wrote:
> 
> >>>I've been trying to use mplayer to stream from Windows Media
> >>>Player servers, in particular the Norwegian national TV channel
> >>>nrk.no.
> >>>
> >>>The first link served by the web server is to an XML file
> >>
> >>mplayer -playlist http://your.playlist.url
> >
> >That works but it would be nice if it went to playlist parsing as a
> >last resort if the file specific parsing failed .
> 
> It used to, or at least it claimed it did (the behaviour did not seem to
> be quite the same as when specifying -playlist). This has I think been
> changed, but I forget why.

I removed it for 2 reasons:

1. If you tried to plan a file MPlayer didn't recognize, it would run
   the playlist parser and then either hang forever (99% of the time)
   or crash. This SUCKS if you type "mplayer *" to play all files in a
   directory and there happens to be one file MPlayer doesn't handle.

2. IMO passing untrusted data to the playlist parser is a security
   hole since the playlist parser is full of buggy string code that
   hangs and crashes and probably smashes the stack. Hopefully the
   MPlayer demuxers aren't quite that bad.

Rich