[MPlayer-users] -ao pcm VERSUS -playlist

[The Wanderer]

Emery Lapinski wrote:

> Hello. I love mplayer! However, I'm trying to capture a radio show
> that is distributed via a RealAudio playlist (SMIL) that contains
> about 10 parts. I am using the "-ao pcm" to get audiodump.wav which
> works well. But it seems that as each new part starts playing it
> overwrites (truncates) the audiodump.wav file. I've investigated
> -dumpaudio but I'm not sure what file format I'm getting with that --
> file(1) is helpfully guessing "data". As a workaround I'm doing
> something ugly with fifos but would prefer a more correct approach.
> What am I missing? I am using MPlayer 1.0pre7-RPM-3.3.2 with Linux
> 2.6.12/Fedora 4.

If I'm understanding your situation correctly, I don't think there's
functionality in MPlayer to handle your problem automatically. However,
it should be possible to work around it.

What I'd do in the situation you seem to be in is to manually extract
the stream URLs from the playlist, and then run 'mplayer <url1> -ao
pcm:file=filename1.wav' and repeat for each URL from the playlist file.

A better solution would involve having MPlayer automatically determine
the filename to use (in the case where there are multiple URLs to be
handled in sequence, I mean), either based on numeric sequence and what
filenames already exist or based on the filenames (if any) in the URLs
from the playlist; no such capability exists at present, but if properly
handled a patch to add it might be accepted.

(FWIW, 'dumpaudio' is outputting the raw contents of the audio stream -
without any encapsulating container; in most cases the result is not
playable, it's provided mainly for debugging purposes.)

-- 
       The Wanderer

Warning: Simply because I argue an issue does not mean I agree with any
side of it.

Secrecy is the beginning of tyranny.