[linux-audio-user] Recording RealPlayer

[Joe Button]

On Sunday 18 April 2004 23:35, Mikhail Ramendik wrote:
>
> Joe Button wrote:
> > On Sunday 18 April 2004 22:04, Robert Jonsson wrote:
> > > I think mplayer has atleast partial support for realplayer streams...
> >
> > Does it actually work, ever? I
>
> It does.
>
> I had mplayer 0.91 successfully get a realaudio stream iver the Net. And
> with the wave-writer audio output plugin, it wrote it to disk, too.
> (mencoder did not manage to work with the stream directly; I had to use
> mplayer and its file output).
>
> To do this, I clicked on the "Listen" link (on a certain site) and had
> Konqueror save the incoming file. It was a brief file containing an url;
> the url started with "pnm://"
>
> Then I did:
>
> mplayer -ao pcm -aofile filename.wav
> pnm://some.site/some_dir/some_stream.ra
>
> It worked!
>
> But, it did not exit automatically. I had to see when the second counter
> stopped ticking, and precc Ctrl+C. Then, the wav file was right there.
>
> For some minutes after this, streaming another stream from the same
> server was not possible.
>
> HTH (Hope This Helps).

It did, thanks very much. I didn't know the thing about having to hack the 
pnm:// file out of the .ram file. I also found I had to explicitly set 
mplayer's cache to something more sensible than 8Mb, which is the default on 
my (Mandrake) system.

So I've got it to work now, but the inevitable next questions are:

* (How) is it possible to get mplayer to use different cache sizes for 
different sorts of file?

* What's the easiest way to automatically feed the pnm:// files to mplayer, 
given a .ram file? It seems like something so trivial it's surprising mplayer 
doesn't deal with this itself. Am I missing something? I must admit I don't 
really understand what purpose of the .ram files is.