Playing ASF streams under Linux (Fedora 10) with mplayer

Hey,

I recently tried to play a ASF stream under linux. I first tried it the most obvious way for fedora users with a default installation is to install the livna repository (now merged in rpmfusion) and install the gstreamer bad and ugly plugins.

The Fedora version i used was: Fedora 10 x64 fully updated.

The Totem way (total failure) So after the installation i tried to play the stream. At first everything seems to be fine… till after a few seconds. Totem starts buffering, plays a bit, freezes the image and buffers a bit, plays a bit, freezes the image and buffers a bit and so on. It plays about 2 seconds then freezes and buffers before playing for another 2 seconds…. you get the point.

Totem’s buffering is absolutely horrible! i tried changing various buffer settings in gconf and changed the connection setting in the totem options. Totem simply seems to ignore any changes. I just can’t get it working in Totem.

Because totem is so useless in buffering (kinda important for a video player!) i say that that player is just a complete waste of time for the gnome developers and a shame they can’t even properly fix buffering while they do add in useless features like youtube support. Without proper buffering that feature is as useless as totem is right now. To totem devs: get totem’s buffering fixed or remove it completely

The Xine way (total failure) I haven’t tried a lot in xine to get this working but installing it on fedora and trying to play a asf stream with it is simply not working. Perhaps i missed somehing obvious. Just not working here.

The VLC way (failure) VLC is starting the same as Totem. It shows some video. After exactly 10 seconds it keeps playing (or that’s what the time counter says) it does not play any sound or video. Kinda sad.. I would’ve expected VLC to just work. I didn’t investigate this problem further but i’m sure it can be fixed.

The mplayer way (working) Finally a player that works. Or not really. At first it didn’t work at all. it throw 5 lines on the console about a million times and i couldn’t figure out why it was happening. After i asked for some help on the #mplayer channel (on irc in freenode.net) it turned out that the stream i was trying to play demands a player that sends a “valid” user-agent string. It got fixed (in my case) by adding this line to the mplayer config file:

echo user-agent=WMPlayer/10.0.0.4058 >> ~/.mplayer/config

The only bad thing is that it took me about 2 hours to find that out. Mplayer wasn’t exactly throwing any errors that indicated anything of a missing or wrong user agent.

So that’s how i got a asf stream working under linux. It took me a few hours but it’s working just fine now under mplayer.

I hope this helped anyone with a simulair issue.

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