Windows – How to associate MMS protocol in Windows 7 with VLC

mms-streamingvlc-media-playerwindows 7

Control Panel\Programs\Default Programs\Set Associations does not give a choice – Windows Media Player is the only option. I have tried modifying the registry for MMS (shell\command key) but MMS is still associated with Windows Media Player

Best Answer

The problem with associating mms streams is that they are not, in the traditional sense, files that have an extension and thus you will not find something to associate with. These streams are actually a url. For example:

mms://a1729.l2168647534.c21686.g.lm.akamaistream.net/D/1729/21686/v0001/reflector:53822

In the registry you can find the following:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Classes\WMP11.AssocProtocol.MMS - URL:mms Protocol

There is a subkey below this level that uses a shell open cpommand, you could, if you haven't already, try changing the default handler in the location.

To open an mms stream in vlc you can select, from the toolbar, Media/Open Network Stream and paste a url, such as the one above, directly.

If you always want vlc to open a stream from within your browser, it will depend which browser you use. If you're using the installer version of vlc it should add the plug-ins for browsers such as firefox and the activex controls for IE.

if the plug-ins have been added correctly, the first time you open an mms feed you should receive a prompt:

alt text

If you have the 'zip' version of vlc you will need to do things manually. see the readme.txt in the activex folder in the unzipped vlc directory.

Related Solutions

Windows – How to associate the keyboard’s media keys with VLC media player

You need to bind your keys in VLC media player. Other answers were right on this, but they were missing a couple of details which I am pointing out here.

Start VLC media player
Click menu Tools → Preferences
Click the Hotkeys section near the bottom left.
Find the action you want to bind and double click in the "Global" column. If you double click anywhere else, you will be binding the wrong keyboard shortcut.
Press your key. VLC media player should recognize it.
Restart VLC media player. If you are binding global hotkeys, VLC media player must be restarted, so it can listen for them.

VLC media player global hotkeys

Save ASF/ASX/MMS Audio Files to Disk – Effective Methods

At long last, I worked out how to do it using ffmpeg. The process was: open the http...asx file in a text-editor, copy the mms...asf URL, and replace mms with rtsp. Then pass the URL to ffmpeg:

ffmpeg -rtsp_transport tcp \
-i rtsp://copper.jolf.jp/1242/sugawara/130106sugawara.asf myFile.mp3

This downloads it and converts to an mp3. It works on Ubuntu 16.04 using ffmpeg version 2.8.11-0ubuntu0.16.04.1. Other platforms and versions are probably OK too.

Slowness

Each second of the file/stream takes one second to download, so it is very slow.

Near the end, ffmpeg pauses for several minutes and then continues and finishes properly. With the file/stream above, the downloading always takes 4 minutes and 12 seconds longer than the duration of the file. (Can anyone explain this or how to avoid it?)

I thought it might be possible to avoid the pause by using -stimeout 10000 ("set socket TCP I/O timeout in microseconds"), but that made no difference. You can do -t -27:00 ("stop writing the output after its duration reaches duration") but that doesn't solve the problem.

Here is a way to find the duration of the file without having to stream it:

ffprobe -rtsp_transport tcp \
rtsp://copper.jolf.jp/1242/sugawara/130106sugawara.asf

Other notes

For the reason why -rtsp_transport tcp is necessary, see here.

I recommend using -hide_banner to make the ffmpeg output shorter.

If you want to just save the file without converting, use -codec copy.

At some point I did these commands:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:mc3man/gstffmpeg-keep 
sudo apt-get update 
sudo apt-get install gstreamer0.10-ffmpeg

But I don't know whether that was necessary. The advice I was following is here; see also here.

I tried libav, which is similar to ffmpeg and has many of the same options. But it was harder to use and doesn't work with the options above.

Why did other solutions not work?

First it was necessary to find the mms URL and replace mms with rtsp.

I think the reason VLC and other applications didn't work was that the file/stream uses a proprietary Windows Media Audio codec that is not available in those applications.

When you stream it in Windows Media Player, the properties say the audio codec is Windows Media Audio V8, but when you use ffmpeg it says it is using the wmav2 codec. It seems that the ffmpeg developers reverse-engineered version 2 and not version 8, but the two versions are compatible.