Windows – VLC media player can’t play an internet radio stream, but firefox and Window Media Player can

mediastreamingvlc-media-playerwindows

I am trying to connect to this online radio station (it is in Thai) using VLC:
http://www2.mcot.net/radio/fm_1005.asx

For some reason, when I connect using Firefox or IE (IE just dumps me over to Windows Media Player), it works just fine.

But when I connect using VLC it tells me:

Your input can't be opened:
VLC is unable to open the MRL 'mms://www2.mcot.net/radio/fm_1005'. Check the log for more details.

When I look at the log it says this:

access_mms error : failed to open a connection (tcp)  
access_mms error: cannot connect to server  
main debug: net: connecting to mediai.mcot.net port 80  
main debug: connection succeeded (socket = 2136)  
access_mms error: error: HTTP/1.1 404 Not Found  
main debug: no access module matching "mms" could be loaded  
main debug: TIMER module_need() : 11058.001 ms   
            - Total 11058.001 ms / 1 intvls (Avg 11058.000 ms)  
main debug: waitpipe: object killed  
main error: open of `mms://mediai.mcot.net/fm1005' failed: (null)

How can I get this station to work in VLC? (Or failing that, what is different about this station that makes it not work in VLC?)

Best Answer

I've tried this, and it works:

rtsp://mediai.mcot.net/fm1005

Reference:

http://forum.videolan.org/viewtopic.php?f=14&t=77738

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.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Windows media player doesn’t play rtsp stream

How to save asf/asx/mms audio file to disk (previous suggestions don’t work)

Slowness

Other notes

Why did other solutions not work?

Related Question