playing MPEG4 Audio (m4a) files [OK: mplayer, gstreamer]

dp · 2004-09-07 22:33:27

i got some m4a files and tried to play them on archlinux

amarok 1.0.2 : shows list of songs, but silience

juk : same situation

xmms : does not recognize files at all

xine-ui : recognizes the codec, but silence

(g)mplayer : plays them fine (but using mplayer for more than one file is horrible, because of lack of playlist-management)

rhythmbox : plays the files fine (but i "hate" it as the playlist support is only a little better than in (g)mplayer )

ok, then i searched the net for a plugin for xmms, found one ( http://fondriest.frederic.free.fr/realisations/ ) but it does not compile

my ideal solution would be to have amarok playing m4a out of the box - as this is not the case, i wonder why xine do not play them (as e.g. kaffeine, a nice frontend for xine and having a playlist support is usable as musik player) and why nobody made a mplayer frontend like kaffeine (kmplayer has no real playlists)

how do you play m4a (if überhaupt)?

sarah31 · 2004-09-07 22:47:06

cd into the directory with the acc's then just "mplayer *.m4a" i would guess.

paranoos · 2004-09-07 23:07:22

there is a plugin for xmms to use mplayer. so you should be able to use xmms' playlist with the codec capabilities of mplayer. not a very elegant solution, but it gets the job done.

dp · 2004-09-07 23:31:09

sarah31 wrote:

cd into the directory with the acc's then just "mplayer *.m4a" i would guess.

thank you - but i'm searching for adding directories recursively on the playlist and also edit it elegantly

dp · 2004-09-07 23:32:20

paranoos wrote:

there is a plugin for xmms to use mplayer. so you should be able to use xmms' playlist with the codec capabilities of mplayer. not a very elegant solution, but it gets the job done.

http://thegraveyard.org/xmmplayer.php

this sounds a cool solution for the meantime (till amarok handles them fine)

i'll check it out - thx

dp · 2004-09-07 23:41:42

tried - xmms do not let me open any file with m4a or acc extension

here the PKGBUILD, if somebody else wants to try:

# $Id: $
# Contributor: damir <damir@archlinux.org>
# Maintainer: damir <damir@archlinux.org>
pkgname=xmms-mplayer
pkgver=0.5
pkgrel=1
pkgdesc="XMMPlayer is an input plugin for XMMS that allows you to play video files from within XMMS using MPlayer as a back-end."
url="http://www.cse.iitb.ac.in/~nandan/xmmsmplayer.php"
depends=('mplayer' 'xmms')
groups=('xmms-plugins' 'xmms-io-plugins')
#source=(http://thegraveyard.org/files/xmmplayer-$pkgver.tar.bz2)
source=(http://belnet.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/xmmsmplayer/xmmsmplayer-$pkgver.tar.gz)
md5sums=('10adb012bd741af84b891958504866db')

build() {
  cd $startdir/src/xmmsmplayer-$pkgver
  ./configure --prefix=/usr  || return 1
  make || return 1
  make DESTDIR=$startdir/pkg install || return 1
}

sarah31 · 2004-09-07 23:50:40

i was only ever able to get mplayer to play aac's i could never get xmms to do anything with them after trying for hours. I just use mplayer if i ever whan to listen to music in linux. other than that i don't bother with music and linux.

dp · 2004-09-07 23:56:47

i found a solution - amarok can play them!!

(i used artsd as backend - of course arts do not support acc's - gstreamer DO! (using faad2? makes somehow sense) *very happy now*)

unfortunately, it seems that tags are not read and the playlist do not contain the metadata

dp · 2004-09-08 00:00:24

sarah31 wrote:

i was only ever able to get mplayer to play aac's i could never get xmms to do anything with them after trying for hours. I just use mplayer if i ever whan to listen to music in linux. other than that i don't bother with music and linux.

he he ... yes, if you can afford mac hardware, you do not need to worry for a lot of things ;-) that is true

first i was listening only cd's and cdcd do the job excellently, but realizing that it is easier to abcde the musik to the harddisk and then just let it play in background in amarok and not worrying to change the cd it was great

now ... being confronted with another codec i never used before, i was first puzzled, why linux do not support it out of the box - but it does (particularly), only you must know how ;-)

dp · 2004-09-08 22:27:09

somehow gstreamer uses 100% cpu sometimes :-(

so i rebuilt xine to use faad2 ( --enable-faad ) and posted a feature-request on this:
http://bugs.archlinux.org/index.php?do=details&id=1400

finally i have them playing *juppie*

sarah31 · 2004-09-09 15:31:16

dp wrote:

somehow gstreamer uses 100% cpu sometimes :-(

so i rebuilt xine to use faad2 ( --enable-faad ) and posted a feature-request on this:
http://bugs.archlinux.org/index.php?do=details&id=1400

finally i have them playing *juppie*

well the thing is that requesting this will mean that mplayer will now have to have faad as a dependency. and just --enable-faad may not allow you to use the external and infinitely better faad library. i seem to remember the "proper" option was something like --external-faad=yes (./configure --help will tell you more)

knowing so few linux users use anything other than ogg or mp3 enabling this feature and having the dependencies might be a bit much. if i had thought it was worthwhile before i would have requseted this nearly a year ago.

dp · 2004-09-09 16:00:10

sarah31 wrote:

dp wrote:
somehow gstreamer uses 100% cpu sometimes :-(

so i rebuilt xine to use faad2 ( --enable-faad ) and posted a feature-request on this:
http://bugs.archlinux.org/index.php?do=details&id=1400

finally i have them playing *juppie*
well the thing is that requesting this will mean that mplayer will now have to have faad as a dependency. and just --enable-faad may not allow you to use the external and infinitely better faad library. i seem to remember the "proper" option was something like --external-faad=yes (./configure --help will tell you more)
knowing so few linux users use anything other than ogg or mp3 enabling this feature and having the dependencies might be a bit much. if i had thought it was worthwhile before i would have requseted this nearly a year ago.

i'm now a little bit confused

you speak about mplayer, and the --enable-faad --- now the mplayer pkg has --disable-external-faad, but with this config can play m4a without problems

i speak about xine that not at all will play a m4a, because the PKGBULID esplicitely tell --disable-faad --- this i cannot understand --- you are right, it would mean to depend on faad, but xine is for most people used to be able to play almost everything and disabling faad i dont ssee a reason why (faad is small)

external faad lib? i never heard about somthing alternatively to faad to use for m4a - can you give me some link? thx in advance

sarah31 · 2004-09-09 18:01:53

i missed the xine reference.

mplayer can play m4a's natively because there is an older internal faad lib.

xine likely uses the existing fadd lib because as far as i know they do not build their own faad lib. that is what i mean by external. external means using the faad package as opposed to an internal faad lib.

but like i say regardless of whether it is xine or mplayer i prefer to only have the bare minimum of depends.

dp · 2004-09-09 18:41:48

ok

if "codecs" is already dependence of xine, it would not hurt adding faad ;-)

hans-jürgen · 2004-10-02 08:04:56

knowing so few linux users use anything other than ogg or mp3 enabling this feature and having the dependencies might be a bit much. if i had thought it was worthwhile before i would have requseted this nearly a year ago.

"Which came first, the egg or the hen?"

Anyhow, hopefully I could help with some information in the other thread concerning FAAD2. Please ask if I left out something. As already mentioned, an up-to-date FAAC project summary is available at http://freshmeat.net/projects/faac/ now with additional FAQs in the comment section.

Something new would be the latest test version of VLC, a multimedia player for several OS platforms including Linux, Mac OS X and Windows which wasn't mentioned in this thread yet. VLC 0.8.0-test2 has been uploaded to the VideoLAN site today and supports playback of aacPlus (= HE AAC) web radio streams now with the help of FAAD2. A list of these stations is available at http://www.tuner2.com/ one of them being SomaFM's "Groove Salad". VLC is the first Linux player being able to decode this stream, because it has fixed the Shoutcast related problems. RealPlayer 10 for Linux cannot do this at the moment, although it has the necessary Coding Technologies decoder and was able to play it when it started as a RTSP stream. XMMS could also play it with its new MP4 plugin based on FAAD2 if it would be adapted to handle the Shoutcast MIME type that is used on this HTTP stream.

Here's the announce from the VLC mailing list:

Betreff: [ANN] VLC 0.8.0-test2
Datum: Fr 01.10.04, 22:41
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Hello everybody,

Here is the second test release in preparation for 0.8.0 (aka Janus).

You will find the new tarball here:
http://download.videolan.org/pub/videol … 8.0-test2/
Binaries for Win32 and MacOSX have also already been uploaded.

As usual, this release contains an amazing amount of new features as well as bug fixes. To name just a few:

* Re-write of the input layer.
(better, faster, more extensible - eg. allows multi-input support).
* Re-write of the transcoding layer.
(everything VLC plays can now be transcoded).
* New plugins cache system to speed up launch time.
* Improvements to the subtitles/OSD subsystem.
* Vastly improved DVD support.
* DirectX Media Object decoder/encoder (Win32 only - supports WMV3).
* Cross-platform OpenGL video output.
* New screen capture input plugin (to stream your desktop).
* Windows Media Server RTSP support.
* Multipart JPEG demuxing/muxing.
(for video streaming to a Mozilla Web Browser)
* DVB subtitles decoding/encoding.
* Audio equalizer.
* etc...

Changes since 0.8.0-test1 include:

* More gradual resampling which should improve the pitch changing effect.
* Improved video filters and new subpicture filters.
* WAV demuxing/muxing with support for multichannel audio.
* Support for AACPlus webstreams.
* VLM enhancements.
* VobSub support.
* etc...

See http://developers.videolan.org/vlc/NEWS for the extensive list.

Please, test heavily and report any problems you might have.

Enjoy!

For the VideoLAN team,

--
Gildas

--
This is the videolan-announce mailing-list, see http://www.videolan.org/
To unsubscribe, please read http://www.videolan.org/support/lists.html

dp · 2004-10-03 00:07:52

vlc for audio (never used it for only audio, as i don't really like the relatively primitive playlist (compared to JuK or amarok))? sounds interesting!!

the package maintainer of vlc should check the next release to support it (deps), so that we are able to use this feature in archlinux - thanx a lot for letting us know

hans-jürgen · 2004-10-03 09:07:12

dp wrote:

vlc for audio (never used it for only audio, as i don't really like the relatively primitive playlist (compared to JuK or amarok))? sounds interesting!!

I think they also updated playlist handling recently, but you would have to look up the Changelog to be sure. For the SomaFM stream it wouldn't matter anyhow, because there is no metadata available yet, only a general title for the stream:

http://somafm.com/aacdemo.pls

the package maintainer of vlc should check the next release to support it (deps), so that we are able to use this feature in archlinux - thanx a lot for letting us know

I also mailed Thomas Nilsson from the XMMS project about the outdated AAC/MP4 plugins on their site and the necessary fix for the Shoutcast MIME type, so maybe they will adapt XMMS to play these streams soon.

dp · 2004-10-03 10:22:38

hans-jürgen wrote:

dp wrote:
vlc for audio (never used it for only audio, as i don't really like the relatively primitive playlist (compared to JuK or amarok))? sounds interesting!!
I think they also updated playlist handling recently, but you would have to look up the Changelog to be sure. For the SomaFM stream it wouldn't matter anyhow, because there is no metadata available yet, only a general title for the stream:
http://somafm.com/aacdemo.pls
the package maintainer of vlc should check the next release to support it (deps), so that we are able to use this feature in archlinux - thanx a lot for letting us know
I also mailed Thomas Nilsson from the XMMS project about the outdated AAC/MP4 plugins on their site and the necessary fix for the Shoutcast MIME type, so maybe they will adapt XMMS to play these streams soon.

sounds very promising

hans-jürgen · 2004-10-04 06:17:33

hans-jürgen wrote:

I think they also updated playlist handling recently, but you would have to look up the Changelog to be sure.

Here's a thread on their forum describing the current status of playlists with relative vs. abolute paths. Seems that you would have to use a workaround yet with a shell script deleting the absolute path from a stored playlist:

http://forum.videolan.org/viewtopic.php?t=4658

Arch Linux

#1 2004-09-07 22:33:27

playing MPEG4 Audio (m4a) files [OK: mplayer, gstreamer]

#2 2004-09-07 22:47:06

Re: playing MPEG4 Audio (m4a) files [OK: mplayer, gstreamer]

#3 2004-09-07 23:07:22

Re: playing MPEG4 Audio (m4a) files [OK: mplayer, gstreamer]

#4 2004-09-07 23:31:09

Re: playing MPEG4 Audio (m4a) files [OK: mplayer, gstreamer]

#5 2004-09-07 23:32:20

Re: playing MPEG4 Audio (m4a) files [OK: mplayer, gstreamer]

#6 2004-09-07 23:41:42

Re: playing MPEG4 Audio (m4a) files [OK: mplayer, gstreamer]

#7 2004-09-07 23:50:40

Re: playing MPEG4 Audio (m4a) files [OK: mplayer, gstreamer]

#8 2004-09-07 23:56:47

Re: playing MPEG4 Audio (m4a) files [OK: mplayer, gstreamer]

#9 2004-09-08 00:00:24

Re: playing MPEG4 Audio (m4a) files [OK: mplayer, gstreamer]

#10 2004-09-08 22:27:09

Re: playing MPEG4 Audio (m4a) files [OK: mplayer, gstreamer]

#11 2004-09-09 15:31:16

Re: playing MPEG4 Audio (m4a) files [OK: mplayer, gstreamer]

#12 2004-09-09 16:00:10

Re: playing MPEG4 Audio (m4a) files [OK: mplayer, gstreamer]

#13 2004-09-09 18:01:53

Re: playing MPEG4 Audio (m4a) files [OK: mplayer, gstreamer]

#14 2004-09-09 18:41:48

Re: playing MPEG4 Audio (m4a) files [OK: mplayer, gstreamer]

#15 2004-10-02 08:04:56

Re: playing MPEG4 Audio (m4a) files [OK: mplayer, gstreamer]

#16 2004-10-03 00:07:52

Re: playing MPEG4 Audio (m4a) files [OK: mplayer, gstreamer]

#17 2004-10-03 09:07:12

Re: playing MPEG4 Audio (m4a) files [OK: mplayer, gstreamer]

#18 2004-10-03 10:22:38

Re: playing MPEG4 Audio (m4a) files [OK: mplayer, gstreamer]

#19 2004-10-04 06:17:33

Re: playing MPEG4 Audio (m4a) files [OK: mplayer, gstreamer]

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