Alien BBC Garbled Sound

[neilcoburn]

I have searched both the mailing lists and the forum, and this has been
raised before but to my knowledge not resolved.

When playing live BBC streams on AlienBBC, after a while (10-20 minutes)
the sound becomes garbled - it sounds like 2 streams are being played a
fraction out of time which each other. This doesn't happen when playing
archive/Listen Again programmes. Incidentally, the live stream is also
noticeably quieter (and muffled) than the Listen Again streams.

Has anyone found a solution to this?

I'm running Alien BBC v0.97, Slimserver v6.1 from about 3 weeks ago on
Windows XP, and playing on both an SB1 and SB2.

[Neil Sleightholm]

I'm afraid this hasn't been resolved. I believe it is an mplayer issue but haven't had time to try and debug the problem.

Neil

Neil Sleightholm <Neil.Sleightholm.1q26vz@...> writes:

>
>
> I'm afraid this hasn't been resolved. I believe it is an mplayer issue
> but haven't had time to try and debug the problem.
>
> Neil
>
Just to add to the chorus: I have the same issue. This problem is new on
6.0.2/0.97 - did not occur with previous version. I needed to upgrade when
SB2 came along - now I cannot listen to BBC anymore. May I encourage you to
research this with some haste ;|

[Neil Sleightholm]

That is interesting, what version where you using before? I don't believe this is an AlienBBC problem, I am sure it is a problem with mplayer and we don't control that. I have posted a bug report on the mplayer forum and although someone else had the problem no could offer a solution.

Neil

[Yannzola]

Which version of mplayer are you all running? The latest version (pre7) did =not= work on my PC. However, (pre6) appears to work just fine.

y.

[Neil Sleightholm]

Even more interesting! I get the problem with pre6 and pre7.

Neil Sleightholm <Neil.Sleightholm.1shm3z@...> writes:

>
>
> That is interesting, what version where you using before? I don't
> believe this is an AlienBBC problem, I am sure it is a problem with
> mplayer and we don't control that. I have posted a bug report on the
> mplayer forum and although someone else had the problem no could offer
> a solution.
>
> Neil
>
Looking thru my archive, it seems I last used SlimServer_5_4_x_v2005-02-12 and
0.93; I did not touch mplayer when upgrading. I should therefore still be
running pre6.

[JJP]

Same problem here - XP, SB2s running 15/07/05 nightly, mplayer pre7, alienBBC 0.98.

Garbling sometimes happens within 2-3 minutes of fast-forwarding the stream which makes BBC unusable. I now have a sore ear due to complaints from "other household squeezebox user(s)".

It's annoying (makes me angry!) that the BBC still insists on using realplayer for audio when they do appear to have adopted a windows media format for some video. I pay my licence fee for them to force me to install some bloated spyware realplayer trash.
/rant

Patience............

[Triode]

JJP,

Not sure you meant "fast forwarding" - just to clarify, Alien doesn't support fast forwarding within one stream.

However if you do get the corruption problem pressing Fwd (as long as you have a playlist of one item) should restart the current stream.

As for the cause of this - yes definately mplayer, I suspect they don't support dynamic rate adaption properly.

[Neil Sleightholm]

If anyone with this problem has time you could try running mplayer directly to confirm this is the same problem. The following command line will play the live Radio4 stream:
mplayer -vo null -cache 128
rtsp://rmlivev8.bbc.net.uk/farm/*/ev7/live24/radio4/live/r4_dsat_g2.ra

I find this this will run for anything from a few seconds to hours but eventually the output will be garbled. I think Triode's comment about "dynamic rate adaption" is probably true because I find this is worse for popular times of the day (Chris Moyles on R1 and the Archers on R4).

If there is anyone out there that knows how mplayer works or can debug it please feel free to jump in....

Neil