AlienBBC improvements

[John Gorst]

Fast forward of 'listen again'
BBC website says that fast forward is not possible (is that just a
purposfule limitation of the bbc popup application), but it is possible
to skip 5 minutes forward into the programme. Would this be possible
with AlienBBC?

Saving 'timeout' setting of transcoder-proxy
On my system it was necessary to reduce this from 0.001 to 0.1 to get
reasonable idle CPU usage from the transcoder-proxy.pl process. I can
see that every time I upgrade AlienBBC (or even worse if it is ever
included within the slimserver download) I will have to edit this value
manually each time. Maybe this should be editable within the slimserver
web interface, and saved with the slimserver config file?

Cheers

[John Gorst]

Display of 'listen again' programmes
When 'listen again' programmes are displayed on the softsqueeze display
if there is more than one day that the programee is on it displays these
days underneath the name of the program. However in the web display the
programes are listed in alphabetic order, also sorting all the anmes of
days into alphabetical order. An exaple of this is listen again-->radio
1-->chris moyles

[John Gorst]

Box to copy and paste audio stream urls into
Using the web interface (standard skin) it is possible to copy and paste
mp3 audio streams into the page http://serverip:9000/html/docs/radio.html
Perhaps a similar box should be present for alienstream. Perhaps on the
same page, or maybe on the specific AlienBBC plugin webpages?

[Jules Taplin]

Hey John.

Fast Forward and Rewind are not likely to be easy to implement. In
fact... I can't even think of a design for it at the moment.

And as for the timeout on the transcoder proxy... there are moves afoot
which might make this completely irrelevant. At the very least, there's
no real reason why the transcoder can't effectively go to sleep (waking
every half second or so) unless it's got at least one stream that it's
serving. We'll try to get something like that out in the next version.


-- Jules


John Gorst wrote:

>
> Fast forward of 'listen again'
> BBC website says that fast forward is not possible (is that just a
> purposfule limitation of the bbc popup application), but it is
> possible to skip 5 minutes forward into the programme. Would this be
> possible with AlienBBC?
>
> Saving 'timeout' setting of transcoder-proxy
> On my system it was necessary to reduce this from 0.001 to 0.1 to get
> reasonable idle CPU usage from the transcoder-proxy.pl process. I can
> see that every time I upgrade AlienBBC (or even worse if it is ever
> included within the slimserver download) I will have to edit this
> value manually each time. Maybe this should be editable within the
> slimserver web interface, and saved with the slimserver config file?
>
> Cheers
>
>

[Jules Taplin]

Eek. Trying to work out what you mean there meant I actually ended up
listening to Radio 1 briefly. That's not good!

I do see what you mean, though. Actually... this is slightly annoying,
and not obvious how to do the right thing. The lists on 'listen again'
on the Squeezebox interface are presented in the order in which they are
parsed from the page... but the web interface sorts the entries first. I
could remove the sorting, but then it makes it even harder to navigate
everywhere else. The basic problem is that the listen again pages on the
BBC website don't have a link called: 'Chris Moyles: Mon', or similar...
they'll have some layup, and the actual programmes will have text tags
of things like 'MON', or 'TUE'. This makes the Listen Again parser
appear smarter than it is. Not sure I can do a lot about this.


-- Jules

John Gorst wrote:

>
> Display of 'listen again' programmes
> When 'listen again' programmes are displayed on the softsqueeze
> display if there is more than one day that the programee is on it
> displays these days underneath the name of the program. However in the
> web display the programes are listed in alphabetic order, also sorting
> all the anmes of days into alphabetical order. An exaple of this is
> listen again-->radio 1-->chris moyles
>
>

[Jules Taplin]

Yup. Could do that. I'm kinda hoping somebody will volunteer to make the
web-page interface less sucky (I only really implemented it as a proof
of concept). Personally... I don't tend to use the web interface for
any of Slimserver - why would I do that when I can talk to the devices
instead?


-- Jules


John Gorst wrote:

>
> Box to copy and paste audio stream urls into
> Using the web interface (standard skin) it is possible to copy and
> paste mp3 audio streams into the page
> http://serverip:9000/html/docs/radio.html
> Perhaps a similar box should be present for alienstream. Perhaps on
> the same page, or maybe on the specific AlienBBC plugin webpages?
>
>

[John Gorst]

Jules Taplin wrote:
> Hey John.
>
> Fast Forward and Rewind are not likely to be easy to implement. In
> fact... I can't even think of a design for it at the moment.

How about a 'skip 5 minutes' like the bbc has?

[kdf]

Quoting John Gorst <john_gorst (AT) hotmail (DOT) com>:

> Jules Taplin wrote:
> > Hey John.
> >
> > Fast Forward and Rewind are not likely to be easy to implement. In
> > fact... I can't even think of a design for it at the moment.
>
> How about a 'skip 5 minutes' like the bbc has?

unless you buffer 5 minutes ahead of playing, there is no way to simply jump
forward into a stream you haven't yet recieved. This is the same problem behind
ff/rwd not working for any transcoding in slimserver. The files are being
streamed, and you can't simply jump ahead in time without buffering. You can't
buffer without a delay starting up. So, it will all come down to who is last
person standing in the two camps. Low latency, or ffwd capability.

Transcoding at least has the advantage of locally stored files. For certain
formats, like FLAC it may be possible to jump becuase the FLAC codec utility
has controls for accessing the middle of the file by time index. Internet
streaming, you are restricted to only what has come before.

-kdf

[John Gorst]

kdf wrote:
> unless you buffer 5 minutes ahead of playing, there is no way to simply jump
> forward into a stream you haven't yet recieved. This is the same problem behind
> ff/rwd not working for any transcoding in slimserver. The files are being
> streamed, and you can't simply jump ahead in time without buffering. You can't
> buffer without a delay starting up. So, it will all come down to who is last
> person standing in the two camps. Low latency, or ffwd capability.
>
> Transcoding at least has the advantage of locally stored files. For certain
> formats, like FLAC it may be possible to jump becuase the FLAC codec utility
> has controls for accessing the middle of the file by time index. Internet
> streaming, you are restricted to only what has come before.
>
> -kdf

I understand where you are coming from there.

However, for AlienBBC only (listen again streams), when the ffwd button
is pressed could it not just start streaming from 5 minutes further into
the programme? It must be possible, atleast using the real audio player,
without buffering the whole five minutes as this is what the bbc radio
player popup does.

Perhaps when the ffwd button is pressed it should ask you to enter the
number of seconds to jump forward by?

Here is the javascript from the bbc player popup - obviously this will
not work with mplayer. But perhaps there is a way to pursuade mplayer to
start streaming from a defined point in hte stream?

<script language="JavaScript" type="text/javascript">
<!--
if(navigator.userAgent.indexOf('Opera')==-1){
if(ismac==false){
document.write('<a href="#" title="Fast forward 5 minutes"
onclick="RealPlayerFF(5);return false;"
onkeypress="RealPlayerFF(5);return false;"></a>');
document.write('<a href="#" title="Fast forward 15 minutes"
onclick="RealPlayerFF(15);return false;"
onkeypress="RealPlayerFF(15);return false;"></a>');
}
}
//-->
</script>

[John Gorst]

Jules Taplin wrote:
> Hey John.
>
> Fast Forward and Rewind are not likely to be easy to implement. In
> fact... I can't even think of a design for it at the moment.

Rather than fast-forward or rewind we could have 'skip to time...'

As you know a lot better than me the real audio stream is hidden within
the web pages of the bbc radio player. I assume mplayer plays the stream
like for example:
rtsp://rmv8.bbc.net.uk/radio3/worldroutes.ra?start=1:34

You will notice it has a ?start=mins:secs
If you copy this link into real player you can mess round with the mins
and secs and skip to various parts of the stream.

I assume you get to this .ra stream by parsing the .rpm file as I assume
mplayer only likes reading directly from the .ra file?

If this is the case you may be able to add an option to skip to a
specific time within the .ra stream. This oculd be done in two ways:
(1) pressing fwd on the remote whilst playing a listen again stream
causes a 'skip to where' dialouge box to appear. This could be a enter
time box or a scroll box like the volume setting?

(2) if it is too involved to add this to the main slimserver code (as
such a minority use alienbbc) it could be an option when we initially
start playing a stream from the plugin menu? Perhaps pressing the play
button woudl play the highlighted stream from the start, but pressing
the right button would ask you where you want to start the stream from?