[MPlayer-users] Re: BUG - Garbled output playing realaudio

[Neil Sleightholm]

Bryan Alton wrote:

> The garbled audio problem is caused by packets being dropped.
> However after more testing both in time and by more users, the nature
> of the problem is clearer and below are my impressions:
> 
> 1. Frequently one or two packets dropped, sometimes 5 or 6. This
> behaviour    occurs throughout the day.
> 2. Occasionally blocks of packets of around 30-40 packets are dropped
> - this    happens at peak hours.
> 3  Very occasionally long gaps of 250-300 packets this seems to be
> network    related and occur less than once a day.
> 
> My first patch assumed that if packets were dropped that it would be
> less than 16 at a time. If more than 16 packets were dropped my patch
> ignored it and this resulted in garbled audio as if the patch didn't
> work.
> 
> I suggest the following behaviour for a new patch.
> 
> For type 1. (typical duration 100-500 msec) my patch will replace the
> missing packets with past sound samples - this will minimise glitches.
> 
> For type 2. (typical duration 4-5 secs) my patch will replace missing
> packets with silence.  There will be some garbling at start and end. 
> Alternative is to replace with a sound sample - this gives a reverb
> sounds which could be annoying but listeners will know the
> connections is still live.
> 
> For type 3. (typical duration 10-40 secs) my patch will replace
> missing packets with silence.  However it is likely that cache will
> be exhausted before stream restarts and if so then Mplayer will never
> recover resulting in choppy audio alternating sound and silence.  My
> patch will shut Mplayer down if cache fill Percentage goes to zero.
> 
> Will this behaviour be reasonable especially for those applications
> where Mplayer feeds into another streaming application such as
> AlienBBC.
> 

Bryan

I agree with this as an approach. I did think that the final option of
shutting down mplayer was a bit harsh but after some thought I realised
that there isn't really anything else you could do! I think this should
work well with AlienBBC. Let me know if you would like anything tested.

Neil

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