[mythtv-users] Playing Music Streams.

[Paul Harrison]

On 19/01/13 05:29, Raymond Boettcher wrote:
> In the official release of 0.26 this support is enabled and I can search for radio stations to listen too.  However, I've never been able to actually get it to tune to a "channel".  Now, in the lastest fixes it seems that you can't get into this part of MythTV at all.  I tried selecting it from the menu and even tried to get around that by selecting it from the menu inside Play Music.  So I'm assuming this option has been "disabled" because of the flukes with the mp3 streaming engine and/or m3u parser not pulling the stream feeds correctly?  (I didn't actually investigate why it wasn't playing the station, just giving a good stab at what maybe going on.)

It's not been disabled AFAIK. Unless something has changed I don't 
believe any of  example streams installed with MythMusic are affected by 
the MythDownloadManger redirect bug or the pls parser bug that I think 
you are referring to. Both of which have been fixed in my fork by the 
way and have open tickets in trac.

> What is the deal with this addon?  I like the concept and even considered editing the database directly to see if I could insert some feeds manually just to get it up and running for now (assuming its the parser and not the engine in failure).

Try running the FE with -v playback,file,network that should give some 
clues as to what is happening.

The parses aren't like the ones in MythStream so editing the DB wont 
gain you anything. In MythMusic they just parse the pls or m3u playlist 
to get a list of URLs to try to play. When you enter a stream you tell 
MythMusic where to download the playlist file, either a pls or m3u file. 
This file gives a list of URLs that are streaming the radio station 
which we try in a random order until we find one we can connect to.


> I also noticed that it searches some site I never heard of before.  I figured this would tap directly into Shoutcast or something.  Is the shoutcast site going to be available through this interface?  Are you able to build custom parsers like we use to have with MythStream from a few years back?  I was really sad to see MythStream go away.  Just as I got around to writing some really decent parsers for that plugin, then the plugin blew up and went away (somewhere around 0.24.0 if I remember correctly, due to UI or API changes I think?).

Some time ago I was advised against using the shoutcast api because at 
the time Nullsoft or was it AOL was threatening another open source 
project with legal action because they wasn't following there TOCs. I 
forget the exact details but it wasn't considered a good idea to use 
there directory api to get a list of streams. I think Icecast was set up 
as an open source alternative to Shoutcast because of problems like this.

The example streams are just that a few streams from various _legal_ 
providers with a mix of music genres to get you started. You can add any 
stream you like using the Add Stream dialog. The problem I have with 
adding custom parses to find streams is they can quickly get broken by 
changes to the source website. The example streams are all defined in 
streams.xml which is just a regular xml text file. You could easily 
create your own spiders/parses to create that file which is exactly how 
I originally created it.

> Anyhow, just wondering...
>
> Raymond Boettcher
>

Paul H.