[MPlayer-users] Re: Re: mplayer crashes when playing radio stream

[cga2000]

Thus spake Bryan Alton on Sun, May 07, 2006 at 07:39:31AM +0100 or thereabouts: <balton at eircom.net> [2006-05-07 02:39]:
[..]
> > no idea why I had -playlist in my command.. tells you how ignorant I am
> > of such matters.
> 
> You need the playist option before an URL which references files 
> which are playlists (!) such as SMIL, ASX and pls.  
> These are all text files which have a specific
> format.  

:-/

> 
> To find the real URL I usually just use wget on the URL if 
> it ends with ASX, SMIL, pls and sometimes RAM to download 
> a copy onto my system.  I then look at the file and usually
> the last URL is the one to play.

excellent tip.. I ended up having to figure out where the link I needed
was hidine in html source written in Dutch or Norwegian among others but
after a while  you get the hang of it and with a little bit of trial and
error you manage to find what you are looking for.

thanks to the above I have harvested about twenty mms/rtsp/http links
that actually point to live audio streams and saved them in a file. I
hope changing these links too frequently would make life difficult for
regular listeners and therefore the should be pretty stable and I will
not have to go through the same process again next week..! 
> 
> You can use google to find the specs for ASX and SMIL files - they are
> in XML but are english enough that you can get the sense without
> delving into specs.

I'll keep that in mind. I really have no time to do this right now and
this is an additional reason why your help was very much appreciated.

Since it doesn't look like I can use mplayer to bookmark these radio
streams, it looks like I'll have to hack some form of ultra-basic front
end.. something that displays a list of radio stations and lets me
select one by hitting enter.. and maybe Ctrl+Enter could launch a web
browser to take a look at the station's web site if I need more info
like what's currently playing.. Shouldn't be too hard..

Well thanks again for your help.

cga