Serious MP3 Playback issue on Windows - most files won't play by default

[Jenny Sebastian]

Hey there!

Trying out Amarok2 on Windows I encountered a SERIOUS issue: Not all mp3s
will be played. At first seems random which are played and which not, but it
eventually turned out that the problem is the mp3 header data, which differs
in position from file to file. If it's too far into the file, the Windows
Mpeg1-Splitter (quartz.dll) will bug out and no playback can be achieved.
This is also the case when there are e.g. pictures in the id3v2 tag.

This results int MANY mp3s being unplayble on Windows.

You can reproduce this bug anytime either
-using graphedit (it willl claim it can't create a graph when the
mpeg1-splitter doesn't like the headers)
-using Windows Media Player 6.4 (mplayer2) (it will error out claiming
"unregistered class")

However, most Windows users aren't aware of this situation , because
-Winamp plays the files
-Windows Media Player 9+ plays the files

So if you don't want the Amarok guys get flooded by angry MY FILES WON'T
PLAY posts on their forum, you better somehow implement something like this:


http://www.free-codecs.com/download/MP3_Parser_DirectShow_Filter.htm

This direct show filter creates sort of a bridge between the mpeg1-splitter
and the eventual decoder (this also results Amarok displaying file length
when vbr was used for encoding properly).

Note: This problem is universal to kde-windows (as in e.g. the phonon
example media player is affected aswell, and juk and dragonplayer should be
too). j

Best Regards
Sebastian Jenny
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