[PLUG] Playing .wma: A Reference For The Rest Of Us

Dave dave at dhdo.org
Sun Feb 26 11:59:58 UTC 2006


I'm pretty sure mplayer by itself can play most windows media stuffs
(assuming you have the right support, and if you're using mplayer right
now to decode it, I'd guess you do), and mplayer can stream just fine..

>From the web, there's mozilla plugins, the debian package is called
"mozilla-mplayer" or somesuch, I use it quite regularly to watch c-span.

On Fri, 2006-02-24 at 11:49 -0800, Rich Shepard wrote:
>    Well! I finally got it all working ... I think. I don't know if the 'wma'
> are supposed to include video with the audio, but the process I found creates
> large mp3 files which are only audio. That's OK with me; I don't know that
> looking at people speaking adds much to the content's value.
> 
>    Here's what I did:
> 
>    1.) Set up Firefox to use ximms to process .wma files. When I tried this, I
> discovered that the files were not run, but were copied to disk.
> 
>    2.) Went hunting on Google and learned that it's a rather involved process
> to convert .wma to .mp3 (stupid Winduhs stuff). Requires Mplayer and lame,
> plus libtheora and cdparanoia (which I didn't discover until later in the
> process). Went to linuxpackages.net and got mplayer, mplayer_codecs, and lame;
> installed same. Went back later for libtheora and cdparanoia.
> 
>    3.) Built the conversion shell script to convert formats:
> 
> #!/bin/bash
> 
> current_directory=$( pwd )
> 
> #remove spaces
> for i in *.wma; do mv "$i" `echo $i | tr ' ' '_'`; done
> 
> #remove uppercase
> for i in *.[Ww][Mm][Aa]; do mv "$i" `echo $i | tr '[A-Z]' '[a-z]'`; done
> 
> #Rip with Mplayer / encode with LAME
> for i in *.wma ; do mplayer -vo null -vc dummy -af resample=44100 -ao pcm:waveheader $i && lame -m s audiodump.wav -o $i; done
> 
> #convert file names
> for i in *.wma; do mv "$i" "`basename "$i" .wma`.mp3"; done
> 
> rm audiodump.wav
> 
>    Made above executable and copied to /usr/local/bin.
> 
>    4.) Made a subdirectory for the conversion, just in case it got messy and
> splattered bits around. Moved all .wma into that subdirectory and ran
> 'wmamp3'. After several false starts because of missing packages, it woiked!
> 
>    Wow!
> 
>    Now for you multimedia gurus: is there any way to watch/listen to a live
> feed of this stuff?
> 
> Rich
> 
-- 
-Dave




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