[kde-freebsd] Trouble with KMplayer

[Danny Pansters]

On Wednesday 07 November 2007 02:25:29 Gary Kline wrote:
> 	Does anybody know why KMPlayer hangs when I try to play *.ram
> 	files?   mplayer handles there fine--at least in my music files.
> 	But when I try to listen to files such as found as
> 	"thewritersalamac.org", K/mplayer stops..  I set Konq to
> 	realplay-10 and it plays.
>
> 	Anybody??


.ram refers to (ancient term) "Real Audio Meta" file. It's a text file 
containing the actual media url(s). Looks like (k)mplayer doesn't support 
these, or maybe it doesn't support it because the media type is .smil 
(another container format) rather than merely .ra or .rv/.rm, the actual 
audio/video data files.

It's been a loooooong time since I dabbled with Real, but I think a server 
admin would use ram files (and generate them at the server) for seperate 
streams, not for the container (smil). So they might be doing something a bit 
unusual at that website or mplayer doesn't like smil files at all.

I tried: Neither a link to media content, nor a link to the .ram file, nor a 
link to the actual .smil file works with mplayer here. Maybe smil (or rather 
Real's smil) doesn't work at all in *mplayer. However, I think smil is really 
to be used over rtsp not over http (unlike ramgen/ram, IIRC that was one of 
the reasons to have ramgen), so perhaps that's what causes mplayer to not get 
it.

Links used:

http://www.publicradio.org/tools/media/player/almanac/2007/11/07_wa and
http://www.publicradio.org/tools/media/player/almanac/2007/11/07_wa.ram
http://www.publicradio.org/tools/media/player/noads/almanac/2007/11/07_wa.smil
(the latter is quoted from the .ram file)

If you use the actual media link that's in the smil file, that works:

[k]mplayer "rtsp://archivemedia.publicradio.org/5559/almanac/2007/11/07_wa.rm"

Dan