Bugzilla – Bug 2860
Unable to play some WMA streams
Last modified: 2009-09-08 09:11:30 UTC
As discussed here... http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?p=79066#post79066 There seems to be inconsistency with the way that Slimserver/Squeezebox 2 handles WMA streams. Most play fine, but some won't play at all.. and some will only play if you tweak the URL. For example.. The following plays happily in Windows Media Player, but not in Slimserver/SB2. http://ms2.capitalinteractive.co.uk/xfm_high If I tweak it to.. mms://ms2.capitalinteractive.co.uk/xfm_high ..then it works fine. Additionally, there are many WMA streams that don't seem to want to play at all. Some examples are.. http://rope.icgo.fimc.net/staticweb/.../onair_xfm.asx mms://ms2.capitalinteractive.co.uk/beat_stream (both the above seem to point to the same stream) Here's the details of my installed version SlimServer Version: 6.2.1 - 5194 - Windows XP - EN - cp1252
I'm having similar issues on OSX 10.4.4, although I cannot play the xfm stream that Aaron mentions in either the http or mms form.
Some other WMA streams that don't seem to play and I can't figure out why... Here's the e-mail from the customer: -------------------------------------- Please can you advise if you have managed to find out why I can not play: http://www.antfarm.co.za/clients/highveld/highveld_22.asx This is from the site below: http://antfarm.co.za/anthelp/radioAnts.jsp I hope that you or someone else can help as this was my main reason for purchase. -------------------------------------- Here's what I replied with: -------------------------------------- It looks like their asx playlist that the URL points to contains something that's not actually an audio stream. I think you might need to e-mail them and ask them for the actual URL to the actual audio stream... It points to another playlist (which for some reason is marked .asp, should be .asx since it's an asx formatted playlist... <ASX version = "3.0" BANNERBAR="AUTO" > <Entry> <Ref href = "http://www.antfarm.co.za/clients/highveld/piggspeak/asxGenPop.asp" /> </Entry> </ASX> But the stream URLs that they list within that are: <REF HREF="mms://196.35.64.36/highveld_22?WMThinning=0" /> <REF HREF="http://196.35.64.36/highveld_22?WMThinning=0" /> And I'm not sure why neither of these streams play. --------------------------------------
(this was tested through squeezenetwork with an sb3 running fw 28 btw)
interesting. http://ms2.capitalinteractive.co.uk/xfm_high - returns a 403 Forbidden mms://ms2.capitalinteractive.co.uk/beat_stream - appears not to support http streaming
(In reply to comment #4) > interesting. > > http://ms2.capitalinteractive.co.uk/xfm_high - returns a 403 Forbidden > mms://ms2.capitalinteractive.co.uk/beat_stream - appears not to support http > streaming > Most of the streams I mentioned were run by Capital Radio. They seem to have made some absurd changes to the way they stream - more info here http://www.capitalfm.com/Article.asp?id=59374 - so that explains the above. I can't get their streams to work even on my PC, now. But all streams I mentioned worked fine when the bug report was made.
I've found I can get the XFM stream to play if I change some of the file format conversion settings. I have ticks in the boxes for all of the AIFF, FLAC, Apple Lossless and Ogg Vorbis formats; ticks for MP3, RTSP to MP3, WAV to MP3 and to WAV, and Windows Media to MP3 and WAV. Unfortunately I cannot remember exactly which ones I changed to make it work but it must have been some of the Windows Media ones that I unchecked.
Here's what I've found: XFM (http://ms2.capitalinteractive.co.uk/xfm_high) : This stream returns 401 unless it thinks Windows Media Player is connecting. When you use mms:// we send a different set of headers that emulates WMP. By using http:// it tries to connect and pretends to be iTunes. For this stream I would suggest using mms:// as I don't see another way around this. Antfarm (http://www.antfarm.co.za/clients/highveld/highveld_22.asx) : This station has numerous problems. 1. It's a nested playlist, and in addition the nested playlist (http://www.antfarm.co.za/clients/highveld/piggspeak/asxGenPop.asp) is served with a text/html content type. Our current behavior for ASX playlists doesn't support nested playlists, and tries to play the first entry in the file. So in this case we try to play asxGenPop.asp as an HTTP MP3 stream. 2. Even if you try to play the stream directly (mms://196.35.64.36/highveld_22?WMThinning=0) the content-type of this stream is application/octet-stream, instead of a proper WMA content type such as audio/x-ms-wma. If the station fixed this, it would be playable, but as it is we assume it's an ASX playlist and try to parse it, and are unable to parse because it's audio data.
Closing this bug. Change 8491 contains many playlist updates. The original stream http://ms2.capitalinteractive.co.uk/xfm_high is invalid and we won't support it. It returns 403 to a normal HTTP request and there is no way to know by the URL that it's a WMA stream. http://www.antfarm.co.za/clients/highveld/highveld_22.asx can now be properly parsed, however the actual doesn't seem to work properly. The advertisement audio streams do play however.