[MPlayer-users] How to tell how far through you are

[Raphael]

Kichigai Mentat wrote:
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> On Apr 2, 2006, at 15.03, Raphael wrote:
>
>> Kichigai Mentat wrote:
>
> [snip]
>
>>>>> Odd, because I thought that the progress meter worked fine. Could 
>>>>> you upload a sample file for us to work from?
>>>>
>>>> http://www.lesshaste.plus.com/test.dump
>>>
>>> Well, I looked at your file, and I discovered some interesting 
>>> things about it. First off: the sample you dumped was indeed a 
>>> RealMedia muxed file, not just a stream dump of the audio. However, 
>>> it's done weirdly. MPlayer will play it, but, as you said, seeking 
>>> is totally b0rk'd. It wouldn't give me the proper seek in seconds, 
>>> but I was able to get the percentage to work with -idx (not what 
>>> you're looking for, but it gives us something to start from).
>>>
>>> However, when I tried playing it in VLC, it simply started to fill 
>>> up the playlist with gibberish, and spat back enough errors to crash 
>>> the player. I took a stab at it with the RealPlayer (yeah, I have 
>>> that...) but it refused to play the file. It gave a nod to RealAudio 
>>> 8, but that's about it. ffplay just locks up when I try to play it.
>>>
>>> I also tried my solution: remux it with Matroska. MKVMerge 
>>> recognizes the RealMedia muxing, but it can't find an audio stream. 
>>> Try as I might, I can't get anything out of it. I also tried dumping 
>>> the raw audio data to a file using -dumpaudio. The dump is 
>>> successful, but the binary data is worthless. MPlayer/MEncoder don't 
>>> recognize it, and neither does MKVMerge.
>>>
>>> How did you come across this file? Is it a download? A stream dump? 
>>> I think that the problem isn't completely with MPlayer any more, but 
>>> also with the source. Do YOU have any other players that recognize 
>>> the file? As an OS X user, I have a different library of tools 
>>> available (No win32 codecs...) so perhaps you can dig up something I 
>>> can't.
>> The file was created with
>>
>> mplayer -dumpstream 
>> rtsp://rmlivev8.bbc.net.uk/farm/*/ev7/live24/radio1/live/r1_dsat_g2.ra
>
> Well, there's part of the problem. RealNetworks likes to be very 
> possessive with their media. Also, this is a progressive stream. If 
> this were a video, it'd probable be in a MPEG-2 Transport Stream. It 
> was never meant to be seeked (well, I don't know another word for 
> it... sought?) through. The stream was just never meant for this.


Although I understand what you are saying, it seems that with -idx you 
can indeed seek through it in mplayer.  Given that, I am not clear 
whether it would be hard for mplayer to keep track of where it is and 
report it correctly.  It does indeed give this information in some 
fashion in terms of a percentage as you mention.  It just seems that 
mplayer has all the information it needs already to make this work but 
doesn't quite use it... I could be wrong of course :)

Raphael