My MPlayer (1 Viewer)

[misterd]

I know that it tooks longer than you all expected, but I just uploaded a new version of the plugin. A changelog can be found in my first post.
to all bug reporters and testers.

Cheers,
MisterD

 

[gregmac45]

Anyone know how get mplayer to play the following clip:
http://content3.videojug.com/f1/f13d19de-ceac-772d-f0ec-ff0008c94aee/cheese-souffle-2__FL8ENG.flv

I get a "stream not seekable" when trying to play it using the mplayer plugin.

Thanks.

 

[misterd]

Could you please give me a log and tell me what version of mplayer you are using?
The reason is that I get different results (crash, playable, decoding errors etc.) with different versions of mplayer and so I'm a little bit confused.

MisterD

 

[gregmac45]

Could you please give me a log and tell me what version of mplayer you are using?
The reason is that I get different results (crash, playable, decoding errors etc.) with different versions of mplayer and so I'm a little bit confused.

MisterD

Using MPlayer-1.0rc1-gui.

Here is one log http://pastebin.team-mediaportal.com/12386

Here is another http://pastebin.team-mediaportal.com/12385

 

[misterd]

Last weekend I tried a lot to get the video working, but it doesnt' work. It seems that MPlayer has a problem when playing flash videos over HTTP. I have found an entry in the mailing list of MPlayer. Unfortunately I don't know when this will be fixed.
I only have an old version of MPlayer which can play most of the flash video over HTTP, but it has many other bugs so it isn't usable.
So at the moment I don't see any chance to get this working and I can't do anything because it is a problem of MPlayer and not of my plugin.

Cheers,
MisterD

 

[Jahnold]

could you make it with unrar suport?

This isn't possible, because then there will be no chance to control MPlayer from within MP. The only chance ist to extract the file to a temporary directory and play it from there. But then every player (internal or external) of MP can play this file.

First of all thank you for writing this great plugin for MP. As above I see I'm not the first person to look for rar support as it's a feature of XBMC that I've grown to take for granted and now I've moved to a window's based media PC am sorely missing.

I have for some time been using the following command on my PC though to play rar files through mplayer without having to extract them first:

rar p -ierr file.part01.rar | mplayer -

it does still allow you to pass command switches to mplayer whilst the rar.exe will just send the video output as it makes it to the stdout and send any errors to the stderr.

Maybe you already know this and there is some other problem with implementing rar support. I hope this helps though.

Thanks again,

Jahnold

 

[misterd]

I have for some time been using the following command on my PC though to play rar files through mplayer without having to extract them first:

rar p -ierr file.part01.rar | mplayer -

it does still allow you to pass command switches to mplayer whilst the rar.exe will just send the video output as it makes it to the stdout and send any errors to the stderr.

I know this command, but it doesn't work with my plugin. The reason is very simple. The rar.exe extract to stdout, which is the stdin for mplayer. The problem is that I need the stdin for controlling mplayer in the slave mode. The slave mode of mplayer is the easiest and best way to control mplayer from an other application.
I have tried to use the stdin for both, but this isn't working.
I don't know how XBMC is doing this, but as mentioned in my earlier post the best way of playing files from an archives in MP, is to extract the file to a temporary directory and then play this temporary file. This can of course be done automatically in the background. Also the temporary file could be automatically deleted after watching the video.

MisterD

 

[Gamester17]

The inner working of XBMC that make it all happen

I don't know how XBMC is doing this

XBMC has virtual filesystem layer which makes the players independent from whatever logical filesystem or network-protocols that is user under it. Then it have separate libraires for all supported filesystem or network-protocols which makes it very modular and thus relativly easy dor developers to add support for additional filesystem or network-protocols. XBMC can stream directly from rar and zip archives, but the player only seen the virtual filesystem that XBMC present to it so it thinks that all files are played locally.
http://www.xboxmediacenter.com/wiki/index.php?title=Basic_overview_of_the_XBMC_source_code
http://www.xboxmediacenter.com/wiki/index.php?title=Category:Inner_Workings

A other related feature in XBMC is the cross-platform DLL loader (dlloader) which load all of XBMC's player as seperate DLLs, these players DLLs including MPlayer are compiled using MinGW/MSYS, (XBMC actually have two video players and three audio player 'cores', each as a seperate DLL, I'm here counting MPlayer twice as it serves as both a music player and a video player).
http://www.xboxmediacenter.com/wiki/index.php?title=Basic_overview_of_the_XBMC_source_code
http://www.xboxmediacenter.com/wiki/index.php?title=HOW-TO_debug_Dynamic_Link_Libraries

PS! XBMC does support audio visualisations when using the MPlayer DLL as the music player:
http://www.xboxmediacenter.com/wiki/index.php?title=MPlayer

 

[misterd]

I have expected something like a virtual filesystem or a memory drive in XBMC. But this isn't really complicated to realize with MP. So I still think the easiest solution for rar support in MP will be to extract the data to specific location, for example to a flash drive, and after watching the movie automatically delete it again.

MisterD

 

[Gamester17]

Why reinvent the wheel?

XBMC doesn't need to extract the whole file to play files from RAR/ZIP, XBMC can stream data directly from the RAR/ZIP files without unpacking it first, it is done on-the-fly so there is no waiting, the video from inside it plays instantly which is the beauty of the solution used by XBMC. I can imagine the end-user experiencing annoyance from having to wait for a 4GB (or even 8GB) rared DVD-R movie they downloaded to first be unpacked by MediaPortal before it can be viewed after they press play on it, (when for the XBMC end-user a RAR or ZIP archive simply acts as a folder).

RARLAB provides the source code for UnRAR and that is what XBMC developers has built to the UnrarXLib library and uses in XBMC:
http://www.rarlab.com/rar_add.htm
http://www.rarlab.com/rar/unrarsrc-3.7.5.tar.gz

Note that XBMC is open source and have already been ported to Microsoft Windows (Win32) platform, it is called XBMC_PC when compiled, so why not port that function to MediaPortal so MediaPortal end-users can get the same experience in its handing of RAR and ZIP archives. At least do a SVN checkout of the latest XBMC source code and test builing in on a Windows computer (and then also look at how it uses, see "/xbmc/trunk/XBMC/xbmc/lib/UnrarXLib/" in the source code).
http://sourceforge.net/svn/?group_id=87054
http://www.xboxmediacenter.com/forum/showthread.php?t=23235

PS! If you are intereated in the DLL loader in XBMC as well then check out this topic-thread on XBMC forums which is indirectly related as they discuss improvements to the DLL loader to make it better suited for cross-compiling and cross-platform porting:
http://www.xboxmediacenter.com/forum/showthread.php?t=26343