| Allan Steed aedigital on 9 Jan 2001 17:20:54 -0000 |
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| Re: <nettime> Frictions.. (fwd) |
Greetings from Black Ball Radio. Mike Weisman forwarded me this email. I thought I'd reply, sharing what little I've learned on ths subject of playlist files for mpeg1 distribution. Most of this info is sitting up on our web server at http://www.blackballradio.com/test/tv/ Here I call this the (/tv) directory.. Since that server allows directory browsing, you should be able to access all relevant files there. On the subject of playlists, I have come to believe that more is actually better. While it's simple to just list a bunch of URLs in a text file, and call it a playlist - most of the applications that will stream mpeg1 REQUIRE extended information in order to process it correctly. Here is an example of a .M3U file that will play quite seemlessly in Winamp, Real, and Windows Media players.. And presumeably on Real Player under Macintosh. #EXTM3U #EXTINF:63,Black Ball Radio http://www.blackballradio.com/test/tv/Black_Ball_Radio.mpg #EXTINF:138,Fritz Donnelly - Blue Lobster 1 http://www.blackballradio.com/test/tv/Fritz_Donnelly_-_Blue_Lobster_1.mpg #EXTINF:47,Black Ball Lotto - 1 http://www.blackballradio.com/test/tv/Black_Ball_Lotto_-_1.mpg #EXTINF:173,Fritz Donnelly - Blue Lobster 2 http://www.blackballradio.com/test/tv/Fritz_Donnelly_-_Blue_Lobster_2.mpg #EXTINF:58,Piratez001 http://www.blackballradio.com/test/tv/piratez001.mpg .. The extended information is really quite simple to enter. The first line identifies the file to the player as an extended .M3U file. The next line provides the player with the clip length in seconds, and the clip title. The URL provided in the third line must be fully qualified for this file to work. You can launch this playlist now by clicking here.. http://www.blackballradio.com/test/tv/bbtv.m3u Note the following points, they are important.. File names must not contain blank spaces, or Real Player will usually kick them out (depends on version). Windows Media Player requires all extended info be included, or it will not know what kind of stream it is fetching, Winamp will play this file nicely, with the addition of the in_video plugin, available on the Winamp Web site, and also in the aforementioned master (/tv) directory. Using Winamp exclusively during testing will assure that both Real and Windows Media players will choke on the results - TEST ALL PLAYERS! Winamp will write an M3U file that can be easily modified to point to http:// serviced media. On the subject of encoding, note that these are all (roughly) 256kbps files. Imagine our surprise when we discovered that these were THE SAME SIZE as the 256kbps Real Media files we generated for the same clips! They were all produced with the freeware TMPG encoder for Windows. You can download the TMPG mpeg encoder for windows from the (/tv) directory also. This nice Win32 application allows custom setting of almost every variable - it's a dream. I would be interested to hear any bug reports, especially from Mac platform users, as we are continuing development of our mpeg1 programming. Please address any replies to [email protected] I hope this helps. Allan Steed AEDigital Media Networks [email protected] ----- Original Message ----- From: Mike Weisman <[email protected]> To: <[email protected]> Sent: Monday, January 08, 2001 8:20 AM Subject: <nettime> Frictions.. (fwd) > Allan, FYI. I have not checked the program to see what it looks like. > > Michael J. Weisman > > Seattle WA > please respond to [email protected] > > ---------- Forwarded message ---------- > Date: Mon, 8 Jan 2001 13:47:18 +0100 (CET) > From: Heiko Recktenwald <[email protected]> > To: "[email protected]" <[email protected]> > Subject: <nettime> Frictions.. > > I elaborated this here, in responses to B92s suggestions for streaming > networks. Many ways lead to Rome. And the aspect of simplicity, you can > write those filelists without knowing any special syntax on every notpad > or whatever simple plain text editor. Without a special application > between, that must be mastered, which is bad for the occasional user. > Might fit into what Geert observed. <...> # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: [email protected] and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: [email protected]