Ubuntu
mplayer package

mplayer command

Asked by KKevin901

I want to download webcast streaming audio files as background musics for commute driving. Don't know much about unix commands or mplayer instruction set. Learn and tried out the mplayer command instruction from different forum discussions:

mplayer -cache 1024 -playlist http://www.rthk.org.hk/asx/rthk/radio4/Chopinstudio/20100328.asx -dumpstream -dumpfile Chopinstudio20100328.wma

Where as:
"http://www.rthk.org.hk/asx/rthk/radio4/Chopinstudio/20100328.asx" is URL address; and
"Chopinstudio20100328" is the final stored file name

It works okay but not perfect. The problems are:
1.) It take quite long time to complete one download. Anyway to speed up the download?
2.) Webstream download breaks very often; then I have to retype the command and restart again. Anyway to improve the connection and/or continue the previous file segment after reconnect?

Would like to see any advise on the above command for improvement. Thanks in advance.

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mycae (mycae) said : 		#1

if you open the asx file in gedit, you will see it is simply an XML file with some file info.

The URL that you actually end up using is "mms://202.177.192.111/rthk/radio4/20100328/2010032820.asf"

You could try the program http://msdl.sourceforge.net/ to download -- it has a "speed" option -- however the remote server will probably throttle you, so this may not work. If you are providing streaming, why do people need to download faster than 1x? This is something that you can enforce server side, and downloaders will be powerless to do anything about it.

This program also claims to be able to support resuming -- so this might work better for you if you need to start a broken download

Now for the unfortunate part: There is no ubuntu package in the repository, as far as I know. You will need to download and compile it from source code.

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