Topic: XMPlay AAC & MP4 plugin

[Brian]

Amazing! Working fine here, too. Well, that will teach me to keep my mouth shut in future until we've heard from Ian.

I imagine this has something to do with the fact that in that version of Winamp, the wretched nscrt.dll dependency hadn't yet made its appearance.

Anyway, many thanks to Ian.

[escafu]

Is there some problem with the mp4 container that stops the year from being reported to xmplay?

aac's are fine but for any m4a files in my library the year doesn't show up.

I use the year as one of my sort criteria so it kinda mucks things up a bit not having it there.

[Zarggg]

Are you 100% positive that the tags are correct?

[escafu]

yep, tags are fine.

done by me or other people doesn't really matter.

I use mp3tag now but previously I used winamp to do the job.

I don't remember if winamp shows the year for m4a's in it's library either.

I could be wrong but I don't think it does, because I remember going in to fix it but the year was already there.

I don't use winamp any more so I can't check that, but for m4a's in xmplay the year definitely doesn't show up in the library.

[Ian @ un4seen]

Please upload a troublesome M4A file to have a look at here...

   ftp.un4seen.com/incoming/

[escafu]

uploaded this file;
03 - Green Day - She's A Rebel.m4a

if you right click the file and select track info in the xmplay library the year doesn't show up there either and it should.

[Ian @ un4seen]

I see the problem. The plugin was looking for the wrong tag - "year" instead of "date". I've put up a corrected version (in the first post).

[escafu]

thankyou very much.

a champion you are 

[Squeller]

Just saw the aac decoding module. Great! Now I can use xmplay in certain situations and installations. I love tiny software, this has a lot of potential. Someone in the ha/fb2k community brought this player to my attention
One question: The thread starters profile is inaccessible... has he left?

[raina]

That's what it looks like. This is what it says on the MaresWEB site

22.05.06      Development of BASS Add-Ons Discontinued
The development of the BASS add-ons was discontinued and Ian Luck from Un4Seen Developments is the new project administrator. Any further updates are going to be released by him on the Un4Seen website.

Found his personal website here: http://www.sebastian-mares.de/

[Bistzack]

Here is a stream that is cut out within first few minutes of start, i.e. XMPlay skips to the next track on the playlist. I've check the stream with VLC and it had been working perfectly for more than 10 minutes.

http://jetcitylounge.groovera.com:7070/

[Ian @ un4seen]

The server seems to be closing the connection. I don't know why. Perhaps it has blacklisted XMPlay as a "stream ripper".

[Dotpitch]

Here is a stream that is cut out within first few minutes of start, i.e. XMPlay skips to the next track on the playlist.

The connection to the server is marked as closed (TCP FIN) after 95 seconds, and XMPlay reconnects. This is the first packet when opening the stream:

Code: [Select]

ICY 200 OK
icy-notice1:<BR>This stream requires <a href="http://www.winamp.com">Winamp</a><BR>
icy-notice2:SHOUTcast Distributed Network Audio Server Win32 v1.9.8<BR>If this is because XMPlay is not Winamp, than that's really sad of them.

[Bistzack]

If this is because XMPlay is not Winamp, than that's really sad of them.

Yeah. Anyway I've sent them an email so that we can know what's their policy regarding XMPlay or non-Winamp players at all.

I was about to suggest adding user agent feature though "falsification of user agent data is PROHIBITED". Not nice.

EDIT: It is sad indeed.

Groovera prohibits stream recording and ripping clients. If all you want to do is listen, try using a client such as Foobar2000.

[Dotpitch]

It is sad indeed.

Gosh... those guys need an angry mob with pitchforks .

[rowan]

I'm not sure if this is an issue with the plugin, my settings or something else.

I have a number of tracks hosted on a web server (https).  So going to https://.../x.mp3 downloads the track.  XMPlay handles these very differently depending if they are mp3 or m4a. 

Now for mp3s it says 'opening' for a fraction of a second before changing to 'buffering' for another fraction of a second and then starts playing whilst downloading the rest of the track in the background.

However, for m4a files it just stays on 'opening' until the whole track is downloaded (10+ seconds) and then starts playing. 

Are there any settings I should check?  Is this a known issue with the plugin?  Any pointers appreciated.

[Ian @ un4seen]

I don't think MP4 files can be streamed, so they get pre-downloaded (like other formats that can't be streamed). If you use plain AAC files (without the MP4 container) instead, then it should be possible to stream them.

[rowan]

Indeed AAC files stream fine, but MP4s don't. 

I have done some reading about it and found some sites claiming that this is because most encoders put all the metadata at the end of the mp4 whereas it can be put at the begining.  If it is at the beginning then they are streamable.

They state there are 2 ways round this
1) For the player to request the end of the file first - but I don't know if all simple web servers like mine would support this.
2) Rewrite the MP4 with the metadata at the start.

I will look into the suggested utilities to do move the metadata and see if it works.

[rowan]

I am not entirely certain about this yet, but reading up in it on different forums like doom9 etc I am coming to the conclusion that MP4s should be quite streamable - both audio only and video MP4s.  They do have to have hints in them to make them streamable and not all MP4 writing software puts those in, but the format is streamable.

I tried what was suggested in other forums I found.  That was to use mp4box to rewrite the file.  It puts the metadata and hints at the start of the file and should mean it is streamable. 

eg:   mp4box -inter 300 example.mp4

was the suggested settings.

However, this does not make it streamable with XMPlay.  And neither do a few other suggested ways of rewriting it. 

I am not sure if that is because it is not doing what is needed or if it is because XMPlay and the plug-in are just assuming that it will not be streamable and not trying.  Will the plug-in try and stream it if it finds the hint at the start or not?

[Ian @ un4seen]

I think the AAC plugin will pre-check/process all chunks/atoms in an MP4 file, but I'm not certain about that. If you upload an example of a file that should be streamable, I'll look into it...

   ftp.un4seen.com/incoming/

Btw, have you been able to stream MP4 files in any other software?

[rowan]

I will try and upload something this evening - can't ftp from work.  I haven't yet been able to do it in anything else as I can't install any other players at work to try, and my network is to fast to easily test it at home.  I am going to do a longer/bigger file to test it at home at some point soon.

[rowan]

I have uploaded the rather optimistically named streamable.mp4 for you to have a look at. 

It will probably be a few days till I have a chance to try some other players on it.

[Ian @ un4seen]

Here's an update to try...

   www.un4seen.com/stuff/xmp-aac.dll

It's a bit experimental, so please report your findings.

[Rowan]

Trying with the files that I have been passing through the utilities to make them streamable, it starts off with Opening... as before.  Then very quickly it then changes to not displaying anything and seems to have given up doing anything with the file... It seems to be deciding it can do some streaming and then stopping (presumably erroring internally).

They play fine locally.

However, playing a file that I have not played about with - just a straight record in iTunes - streams perfectly where the old version had do download the whole thing.  How ironic 

It certainly seems to be getting there.

[Ian @ un4seen]

I only tested with the "streamable.mp4" file that you uploaded, but that seemed to stream OK. Is that file not streaming there? If that's OK but you're having the trouble with other files, please upload another example.