[Theora-dev] Directshow filters 0.64.7878

[Thomas Vander Stichele]

Hi,

> I had a good look at it today... and have found that it's actually extremely 
> difficult to reconfigure a running graph even under ideal conditions. Doing 
> it properly for homogenous chains in all cases... is really hard... doing it 
> for arbitrary chains looks like way way more trouble than it's worth... and 
> i don't think any other player can do that yet anyway, so i'm not going to 
> lose any sleep over that.

We see the same issues in GStreamer.  It really is non-trivial.

> Is there a test server somewhere with a theora+vorbis stream ?

http://mirror.fluendo.com:8800 should always be running.  If not, feel
free to poke me.  I'll probably set up a second one as well that just
generates a feed instead of using a device, which will have even more
chance of always being online.

> The conditions under which i can get chaining to work with this hack are...
> 
> a) The stream is non-seekable.
> b) Each chain contains the same number and type of codecs with the same 
> settings (ie can't change the samplerate or the number of channels)
> c) The stream is valid.
> 
> Which as far as i know this means it should be fine for icecast.

Personally, I'd already be happy if it could play a non-chained network
stream.  I understand how chaining is important for icecast, but I
personally like the one-chain approach more.  Really, chaining oggs
together is just a bad way of doing a radio anyway, you want to have
mixing done.


> Also something i noticed on virgins 
> site(http://www.virginradio.co.uk/thestation/listen/ogg.html)... which may 
> interest you wrt to this... is that they supply links as .pls files. However 
> WMP doesn't support .pls files (though winamp and iTunes do)... there may be 
> a special filter around somewhere for it... but it's not instaled by 
> default... so that may be something to keep in mind.
> 
> In order to play the stream you need to save the .pls file and copy/paste 
> the naked link out of the file into WMP. I think there's probably another 
> playlist format that is windows friendly... maybe .m3u ?

yeah, .m3u should work.  We'll probably make our server autogenerate
playlist files for the streams on the fly, as well as server a java
applet to see the stream.

Thanks again for the work !

Thomas