[PLUG] VLC Expert Needed

John Jason Jordan johnxj at comcast.net
Mon Nov 26 19:21:21 UTC 2007


In my continuing quest find something that will play radio streams as
well as MP3s, I have spent a couple hours with VLC. It may turn out to
be the best solution, that is, if I can keep it from crashing and if I
can figure some things out.

1) <general rant> It is acronym city. Go into Preferences and just
about every choice is an acronym. I don't know what any of them stand
for, and even if I did I still probably wouldn't know what it does.

2) It plays my MP3s just fine, although you have to click four times to
get it to display the list. It can't seem to remember the folder where
it found them the last time.

3) Evidently you can create a playlist, but you just about have to
create it manually in something like Gedit. Here is a sample of what I
created for streaming radio:

[playlist]
NumberOfEntries=17
File1=http://home.themaestro.net/3mbs.asx
Title1=Melbourne MB3
File2=http://www.quicknet.com.au/netshow/4mbs.asx
Title2=Brisbane MB4

I added 17 items by copying and pasting URLs from publicradiofan.com
and manually typing the titles. There are about a hundred stations I am
insterested in, but I started with just the 17 because I wanted to
choose various kinds of streams. As far as I know .asx is a Windows
Media Player format. Others that I added included .rm, ram, m3u, .smil
and .pls. That is the URLs ended in those extensions. I think .rm
and .ram are Real Media formats, and .m3u and .pls are some kind of
playlist format.

VLC happily opened my playlist file, and actually plays some of them.
However, when I try to play one of the .asx streams VLC's playlist
window shows that it is adding files (lower left corner). It does this
for hundreds, sometimes many thousands of files. If I wait until it
finishes (which may be a long time) I note a long list of files under
the heading for the stream. In one case they all ended in .MP3. It
appears that VLC might be going out to the station and downloading a
link to every piece of music that station ever played. Except that
can't be completely right because for some stations it appears to
download the same link several thousand times, while for others each
link is different. For the .asx streams it finally goes ahead and plays
the stream once it finishes downloading all the links (or whatever
these things are). That may be five minutes later. 

"OK," I thought. "I'll just delete these entries." Hah! You can select
them all, but when you click on Delete it will delete only one at a
time. That is, one click for each of tens of thousands of entries. I
should add that it occurs to me that giving the listener links to the
music must be illegal. And I did delete all the entries for one station
that had only a couple hundred listed. The station still played fine.
But when I shut down VLC and relaunched it, then opened the playlist
file again, it had to go through the search all over again before it
would start playing the station.

It won't play any of the streams ending in .pls, .rm or .m3u. No error
message; it just goes on to the next entry. And that's another thing I
need to fix. I don't want it to go immediately on to the next entry. I
want it to play an item I select and then stop. I searched through all
the acronyms in Preferences, but I couldn't find any way to stop this
behavior. I probably didn't know the acronym for it. And might there be
a plugin I need for the .rm, .ram and .m3u streams?

Or is VLC the wrong tool for playing internet radio? Should I just give
up on it?



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