[MPlayer-users] Playing DASH streams / .mpd files

[Dave Woodfall]

On 17/03/21 10:15,
Reimar Döffinger <Reimar.Doeffinger at gmx.de> put forth the proposition:
> On 17 March 2021 09:53:22 CET, Dave Woodfall <dave at tty1.uk> wrote:
> >On 16/03/21 22:01,
> >Reimar Döffinger <Reimar.Doeffinger at gmx.de> put forth the proposition:
> >> Hi!
> >> On Sat, Mar 13, 2021 at 06:23:21AM +0000, Dave Woodfall wrote:
> >> > How does one play a DASH stream in mplayer?
> >> >
> >> >
> >https://a.files.bbci.co.uk/media/live/manifesto/audio/simulcast/dash/nonuk/dash_low/aks/bbc_radio_four_extra.mpd
> >> I've not had time to actually test, but I think it should just work
> >> if you link against a separately built FFmpeg instead of MPlayer's
> >> own copy.
> >> The problem is that with the built-in FFmpeg copy we disable the DASH
> >> demuxer because it would create a dependency on libxml2.
> >
> >Thanks for the reply.
> >
> >That would explain why ffplay works then, and why I couldn't get any
> > -lavfdopts or other flags to make mplayer play any streams, although
> >I have very limited knowledge of ffmpeg flags and what they all do.
> >
> >Is there a problem with linking to libxml2?  My copy of (a recent svn
> > + ffmpeg from git) mplayer seems to link to it:
> >
> >ldd =mplayer | grep xml
> >libxml2.so.2 => /usr/lib64/libxml2.so.2 (0x00007f3f32630000)
> Huh, that seems strange.
> It's not a very nice dependency and DASH is fairly rare, so I probably would have rather avoided it, though mostly I thought we did not have a configure check for libxml2, adding those is always a pain.
> It's possible to remove the one mention of DASH from configure to enable the support and see what happens...

I didn't see any mention of DASH in either MPlayer's or FFmpeg's
configure, but I do see these in the build output:

CC      libavformat/dash.o
CC      libavformat/dashenc.o
CC      libavformat/webmdashenc.o

So maybe DASH is supported in some way?  But maybe for encoding, not
decoding, judging by the last two?

My experience of playing that DASH URL in FFplay so far aren't great
though - it seems to play for perhaps a minute, sometimes less, and
then it just hits 404 errors on chunks.  This is probably something
best to ask about on the FFmpeg list though.

For some reason known only to themselves, the BBC have decided to
remove their plain MP3/AAC radio URLs soon, which I usually listen to
with MPlayer, and after that there will be only DASH left it seems.

--
Dave