Re: <nettime> Frictions.. (fwd)

[Heiko Recktenwald <uzs106@IBM.rhrz.uni-bonn.de>]

Thanks a lot for your reply. Check it out on Unix ;-)

On Mon, 8 Jan 2001, Allan Steed aedigital wrote:

> 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

Or a "metafile" in Reallingo. 

> 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.

Yeah. But what do you do with those people who dont have a mp3 Player,
that supports video ? Imagine a world with an Apple email system and a
Wintel system.. Maybe I am oversimplifying things, but my frist internet
experiences were Kermit and VM/CMS, thats why I say "What doesnt run on
Unix isnt in the world".

> > #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

Yeah, if you do it every day.

> 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,

Ah, the Media Player is phantastic, plays my simple m3u fake lists without
any problem. I hope dear and noble Bill supports the extension mxu
(formerly mgu) in his next version !!

And the others will follow...

> 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.

Yeah, I see that we are doing the same kind of experiments, thanks again
for the feedback ;-)

> 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

Well, 256 is 256..

I did it with much less bandwidth, just to prove that MPEG streaming can
work even over modem. And I compared MPEG and REAL in quality. There are
differences, but they are not so important. 

> 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.

This is a great program. The only GUI tool, that comes near avi2mp1.exe.
But (!), you should really try to get the original mpeg_encode. There you
have a parameter file with *much* more freedom for your experiments. The
authors of avi2mp1 etc had VCD etc in mind, not streaming. Might change
soon, if we tell more people how much *fun* (in the Carla Bley
sense) such experiments can be ;-)

Best,

Heiko

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