Attn: Ben Klaas - This American Life Parser

[malsbury]

alright, I got mplayer working (thanks to the gentoo forums), now it's on to making slimserver work with these real audio streams. Tom, have you gotten that far? I'm assuming there needs to be a new line in convert.conf to handle .ra streams?

And while we're at it, mplayer should be able to handle a few more...wma, asx, etc. Any pointers there? http://www.pfarrell.com/music/slimserver/tips.html has some good pointers on wma over ffmpeg, but I'd like to know the ropes with mplayer...

That's great to here you got it up and running. Now, if you install the new AlienBBC 0.99 for linux, it sets up a seperate slimserver.conf that overides any seperate entries in the convert.conf. It adds the handles for both RealAudio and WindowsMedia streaming that you will need. It also takes care of wma local files so you no longer need to use ffmpeg.

Eventhough I don't directly use the AlienBBC plugin, it is useful just to have it installed so it takes care of all the *.conf stuff that always takes so much tweaking. The only change that I made was to change the volume=0 value to volume=8 on both the WMA and RA settings since they were a little quiter then my AAC (.m4a) conversions using FAAD. If you need to make a similar change, you will see where to make it based on the nice #comment sections in all the AlienBBC files.

I'm assuming that you have installed the _pre7 version of mplayer, if Gentoo only is up to the _pre6 release, the settings are in the files too, you just have to remove the comment marks.

Any other questions, feel free to ask. It has made all the difference for me once I got it working. I've even updated the PublicRadioFanBrowser plugin to take advantage of streaming WM and RA. See my post in the Plugins Forum.

--Tom Malsbury

[bklaas]

From reading some other threads on slimforums, it looks like convert.conf is for files only, not streams. So, I'm quite baffled as to how I can stream real audio out slimserver via mplayer (without AlienBBC, as Malsbury mentions in the first post to this thread)...I'm assuming *something* needs to be configured *somewhere*.

[bklaas]

whoops, missed your post there Tom. Will try your recommendation on installing AlienBBC and see how that goes. Thanks for your input!
#!/ben

[bklaas]

never did get mplayer/real to work...to be honest, I'm not surprised. There is nothing I've flailed with more through my time with slimserver than trying to listen to Alien streams...

opened up a separate thread on it...
http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=17732

Looks like things are getting better, but I just can't seem to cover the last mile to having this work. oh well.

[bklaas]

TAL_parser.pl v1.4 is at http://benklaas.com/slimserver. I put in a couple of lines to avoid duplicate streams in the playlists (i.e., dates where reruns were aired)

FWIW, I did finally get mplayer to pipe real audio to slimserver. The key was to make sure that mplayer was built to use the win32codecs realaudio support instead of RealPlayer's (go figure). This HOWTO is what got me through it (it's gentoo-specific, but lots of good info there)
http://gentoo-wiki.com/HOWTO_Rip_Streams_With_MPlayer

Also Tom, thanks for the pointer on turning the volume up for the real streams...worked like a charm.

cheers,
#!/ben