[MPlayer-users] MPlayer errors decoding captured streams

[Reimar Döffinger]

On Sat, Nov 02, 2013 at 08:24:50PM -0700, JW wrote:
> I'm currently using "MPlayer sherpya-r36349+gb24f15c-4.6 (C)
> 2000-2013 MPlayer Team" under Win7 Pro x64.
> 
> For at least the last year I've been saving streamed audio using
> mplayer, via
>     mplayer -playlist
> "http://playerservices.streamtheworld.com/pls/CBC_R1_VCR_H.pls"
> -cache 512 -dumpstream -dumpfile STREAMFILE.acc
> (Which I force to exit after a fixed period via TaskKill. Is there
> some other way to tell mplayer to stop saving after a fixed time?)

I don't know what that program does.
There is -endpos, but it works very badly for this use-case.
The way you are supposed to do is by either
1) using -slave and sending a "quit" command - though I am not sure this
works with -dump*
2) sending a SIGINT signal to the process

while both are also possible on Windows, to my knowledge they are a
huge pain to do unless you have e.g. cygwin installed

> For a long time this has been working reliably. However, recently
> the stream format has changed in some way that produces smaller
> saved stream files, without changing the format reported by
> MediaInfo. However, for about half (but not all) of the new,
> smaller, saved stream files MPlayer is unable to decode the stream
> that it has, itself, saved. Instead it reports an error.

A sample would be useful to allow us to fix it.

>     Playing STREAMFILE.aac.
>     libavformat version 55.9.100 (internal)
>     MPEG-PES file format detected.
>     MPEG: FATAL: EOF while searching for sequence header.
>     Video: Cannot read properties.


MPlayer seems to incorrectly think it is a MPEG-PES file.
-demuxer lavf or -demuxer audio will probably work around it.