streaming wmv and RM formats

[storyteller]

its a delight to have winamp play wmv and RM files perfectly from my hard drive. not surprisingly, this made me wanna throw WMP and RealOne in the trash (after i pass them through the shredder of course).

but that all was before i found out that winamp can't play wmv and RM streams. when i click a link that points to a wmv or RM stream, winamp opens up and it looks at me like i did something dumb. nothing happens at all. i see the file location in winamp but no stream playback whatsoever.

am i doing something wrong or is winamp not yet able to support wmv and RM streams? i knows millions of you people out there would rather to have one program to play two types of media instead of two players to play two types of media (what a terrible waste).

is there a plugin to make winamp play the mentioned streams or would such feature need to be implemented in "deep code"?

[DJ Egg]

wmv and rm streams are working fine for me

I don't have too many links, but here's a few I've picked up along the way:
http://www.niftybitch.net/funnies/JurassicFart.wmv
http://content.collegehumor.com/media/movies/mario.wmv
http://www.analogueworld.com/videos/...-_Fuck_You.wmv
rtsp://213.200.64.234/farm/*/encoder...livestream2.rm
rtsp://a1703.v9950f.c9950.g.vr.akama...1_sjack_300.rm

Are you saying that these don't work for you?

WMV is supported by default, and the streams should work 'out of the box'.

RM, RA, RAM, etc support is provided by the Tara plugin,
and requires the Real Engine/Codecs to be installed.
Sure, you can uninstall RealPlayer and use RealAlternative codecs instead, or one of the other workarounds (hmm, dead link).

So umm, yeah, this should really be in the Tech Support forum.
No point in asking for features which are already implemented/possible...


Maybe provide some of your wmv & rm stream url examples...?

[storyteller]

thanks for the reply DJ Egg.

sorry for misplacing my post in the form and i'll be a little more conscise this time.

the streams in the example urls you gave me worked ok in winamp.

but the following link is still not working for me:

rtsp://strsrv2.melodyhits*****video/u...-video5735.wmv

when i enter the above link into WMP it plays ok. when i enter the same link into winamp, it won't play.

when i enter the same link into my browser, RealOne opens up (wtf!!??) and tries to play the stream then it fails.

it is weird that RealOne tries to play this particular link when i enter it into my browser because i am positive that my file associations point to winamp to play wmv files.

anyway, for some reason winamp can't play the link in this post, even though it is a valid one.

[siebe83]

maybe rtsp is for realmedia??
not certain, but maybe try changing it to http
[edit]almost certain that's it...
so that explains why it's opened in realplayer as well
but then it appears not to be realmedia, so realplayer will fail to play it

appearantly winamp is more sensitive to the difference between rtsp and http as is WMP
just change rtsp:// into http://
[/edit]

[drewbar]

rtsp isn't just a Real thing. Real-Time Streaming protocol. It's a UDP based streaming protocol for multi-media. It's an open standard. But Winamp doesn't support it. A lot of rtsp servers have an http alternate.

[siebe83]

Originally posted by drewbar
rtsp isn't just a Real thing. Real-Time Streaming protocol. It's a UDP based streaming protocol for multi-media. It's an open standard. But Winamp doesn't support it. A lot of rtsp servers have an http alternate.

in that case it's rather strange the browser opens realplayer (while it's a wmv file)
another reason not to use realplayer

so it's just coincidence replacing rtsp with http works? (ie that they have the file on their http server as well)

[edit]
@storyteller:
what language is that video in?
just curiosity

[drewbar]

Yeah. In Windows a program can register control of a protocol. Real registered rtsp://

I think so, because it is the same for some mms:// streams. Sometimes you can switch it to http:// sometimes you can't.

[storyteller]

so you guys are telling me that winamp doesn't support rtsp and it won't play rtsp streams unless we are lucky enough to have the same stream available in http. (as it turns out the streams are indeed often available on rtsp and http at the same time)

would rtsp support sound like a worthy wishlist item? or is rtsp slowly fading away into obscurity like mms did? is adding rtsp support to winamp as simple as a small registry edit in windows?

btw: for those curious, the stream i included previously is an arabic song. the singer is either lebanese or syrian (or from somewhere in the middle east). there is a shit load of these videos on www.melodyhits.tv in addition to western music.

[storyteller]

Originally posted by storyteller
is adding rtsp support to winamp as simple as a small registry edit in windows?

diregard dumb question

[DJ Egg]

Well, you can clearly see by my stream examples above
that rtsp:// streams ARE supported in Winamp
but only if they are rtsp:// streams using a RealPlayer compatible format which is associated with the Tara plugin (in this particular case = .rm)

But RealPlayer/Tara doesn't support .WMV

WMV support is provided by the DirectShow Decoder (in_dshow.dll),
but it would appear that it doesn't support rtsp:// protocol whatsoever.

Luckily for you, as already pointed out...
http://strsrv2.melodyhits*****video/u...-video5735.wmv
works perfectly in Winamp.