To make sure you’ve go the idea that mplayer is really a swiss army knife for media files that can do most anything. I wanted to get a post JUST on this idea. Any media format that mplayer recognizes it can dump the audio to the most common and readable audio format out there, the PCM Wav file.
Here’s how it goes:
On my (somewhat older) laptop, I’ve noticed that MPlayer sometimes gets the audio and video out of sync. The audio is moving faster than the video. I’ve noticed this in octoshape streaming as well as in playing standalone videos.
I discovered a quick fix to this is to use the d hotkey on the keyboard. This toggles between frame dropping modes. By default mplayer tries to draw every frame it receives, but toggling to either framedropping enabled or framedropping hard can help keep the video up with the audio track. I’ve found this has made my octoshape streams usable again! (Usually I just make use of the framedropping enabled instead of the hard setting. (I haven’t investigated the difference between the two.)
Recently I’ve run across a realmedia stream that I really want to convert to mp3 (mainly because my portable player can’t read rm files. I’ll talk about capturing rm streams in another post, but this one is going to talk about converting from rm to mp3.
For starters, it’s possible to use mencoder for this as follows:
The biggest problem with Audio and video content is the variety of different codecs that are supported by different players. On Windows this usually means having Windows Media Player, Realplayer and Quicktime installed, plus who knows what else. I was having a discussion yesterday about some videos that I had given to someone that work fine on my linux desktop, (divx format I believe), however Windows media player fails to find a codec. I told him that I’ve always felt Media Player was a bit “snobbish” with regards to codecs. It’s a great idea to be able to detect and download the codec on demand, but in reality, I didn’t recall seeing xvid/divx being among those that would auto-download (may have changed by know I’m not certain.) Anyway, I suggested mplayer as a good multi-format video player. Mplayer will handle most any video format thrown at it.
So, I’ve been looking back over my list of “scripts” that are pulling in audio from various news sources online for the onlineradiotv.com site. It’s also got me doing a bit more spanish language listening than I had been. In the car, I usually use an mp3 player (the nexia) with a small FM transmitter to listen. One of the problems is that I only have a very short list of sources that I can actually download an mp3 from. The rest are streams only. Some are mms (Windows media) streams, others are (rtsp) real server streams… yet others are “playlist” style asf, or ram files that point to other files (rm or asx/wma)…
I did an article a while back about cron and scheduling tasks in linux (I also mentioned kron which is a graphical interface for cron scheduling…). That works well and good for things that happen on a recurring basis, but the next question is what if I want to schedule a command (or series of commands) to happen once and not again? Well, to tell the truth I’ve used cron for this on occasion, being sure to revisit the crontab and remove the entry before it repeats again, but there is a better way. At.
I’ve posted several things over at the onlineradiotv.com site. For starters I’ve got links to a few international (shortwave) broadcasters live audio streams and where available their “latest” english news update (and in some cases spanish and other languages.) I’ve also started posting some bash scripts there that can directly start mplayer streaming a feed.
Ok – so now post upgrade to Mandriva 2006 I sit down to try something out. Put a dvd in the drive and see what happens. I rarely sit and watch dvd’s on the desktop, but it’s always been a possibility… So, when I pop the disc in, kaffeine pops up with it’s “install” sequence – checks to see what’s on the system and what’s not what version of kde, libdvdcss, dvd, dvb hardware, etc….
So, the disc pops up and no sound…. hmm. maybe it’s just kaffeine…