AlienBBC and Mac instructions

[danco]

At the moment there are a few people who are testing my instructions.

You've got mplayer working, so that is one issue dealt with.

Try checking the permissions on mplayer (and lame). Everyone should be able to read and execute.

I know some people have had issues in the past where mplayer works but AlienBBC doesn't. But I can't recall the solutions.

[bpa]

You could try to increase the Radio Station Timeout (under server setting/Network) to something like 15 or 20.

[GeeZa]

danco -- if you look at my file listing on the previous page it does appear that both /usr/local/bin/mplayer and /usr/local/bin/lame are executable by all. Also nothing out of the ordinary in /usr/local/lib/libmp3lame.*

bpa -- just upped the timeout to 20, still no joy.

I can connect to all those BBC streams (e.g. http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio1/realaudio/media/r1live.rpm) fine at the command-line but get nothing from Softsqueeze.

[danco]

Sorry, I missed that you do have mplayer and lame executable all, as you said.

Could you by any chance have another copy of mplayer installed? mplayer.sh will pick up a copy of mplayer in /usr/bin or /usr/sbin and will use it in preference to the one in /usr/local/bin, and such a copy of mplayer won't find lame.

I don't see any reason why the slimserver-convert.conf and the custom-types.conf should differ between 6.5 and 6.2 (or 6.3), but I note that you don't seem to have replaced these.

[GeeZa]

Good points danco, I may well have mplayer somewhere else, I will check my filesystem. I didn't do anything with the slimserver-convert.conf and the custom-types.conf files that came with the alienbbc distribution. Do I need to copy these somewhere?

Thank you for your help btw. Much appreciated.

[danco]

Those two file should go into the SlimDevices folder. But if you had a previously working AlienBBC they(or more likely a different version, which might be relevant) are there already.

[GeeZa]

Hey danco, copying the slimserver-convert.conf and the custom-types.conf files over to ~/Library/SlimDevices did the trick. Ran the debug mode and can now see mplayer.sh being initiated. That's great news. I think the reason I didn't have them before was either the 6.5b1 SlimServer version of alienbbc didn't need them or I simply had them in a different place (under PreferencePanes probably) which moving back to 6.3 kinda made redundant.

My stupid fault for not copying them across. :-)

[bpa]

A feature of Slimserver 6.5 is that Plugins can have their own custom-convert.conf and custom-types.conf in their Plugin directory. This make it easy to update and not affected other Plugins.

Unlike in 6.3 with a common custom-types.conf and slimserver-convert.conf which means after an update, some customisations of these files may be lost.

[NA9D@speakeasy.net]

Hi all,

Just wanted to add to this thread since it's related and since this thread has helped me get installed - I think.

I want to stream some WMA streams via SlimServer. I've been told that the way to do this is via the AlienBBC plug-in which uses MPlayer and LAME. I went to the AlienBBC web page and followed the instructions. I've got LAME installed and the AlienBBC plugin. Unfortunately, the MPlayer binary they have is for PPC only. So not having an Intel binary stumped me until I happened upon this thread. I've managed to get the MPlayer binary installed and I think things are working.

But the WMA streams I am trying to play are giving me problems. I'm getting all sorts of digital "noise" - bit errors, and the tempo of the music isn't constant (like it's trying to speed up and slow down to catch up with the stream). It sounds really bad - almost like the server machine can't keep up. But this is a brand new 2.66 GHz MacPro. Certainly a quad core Xeon based machine can do this!

I am able to play the BBC rtsp streams fine. Maybe someone can suggest some other WMA streams out there that I could try?

I'm trying to determine if it's in my SlimServer/Alien/Lame/Mplayer settings or something else.

Any help would be great.

Thanks,

Jon

[bpa]

I assumed you have tried to play the stream on a SB with WMA built -in enabled because you only need Mplayer if you are using
* SoftSqueeze
* the stream is not using the http protocol (I think)
* the stream uses the WMA speech codec

So if you a have stream URL that only playu with mplayer - post the URL and let others try it out.

Mplayer is by no means perfect or complete. On Linux/OSX systems the WMA codecs are not Microsoft developed so there could be problems.