Guillaume said:
Steve:
Depends on the player. But you probably should just pass the list in an
.m3u file.
Yes a m3u redirector file can be used on some players, such as Winamp,
to play a stream of several sounds. The structure of a m3u file is much
the same as that of a ram redirector file. Below is a slightly edited
version of a post on this subject that I made last July to another
board. It has a few examples that will work if you have a Winamp or
other player set up on your computer to handle m3u files. For example,
Winamp has menus to select the type of files it will use, one being
m3u.
Making Real and WMP formats stream is fairly standard, but some other
formats also can be made to stream. There are several ways of forcing
streaming. One is the use of a redirector file. For example the Real
redirector file .ram directs to where the Real media .rm is stored. On
an ordinary web server you just redirect to a file where the .rm is
stored. If you have a streaming server, you redirect to it using some
special code. A file on a regular web server works just fine if you do
not have a large number of hits at the sam time and are not
broadcasting a show in real time. Here I will assuume you are using an
ordinary web server.
First the correct mime types must be installed on the server for all of
the types of media files and redirector files you wish to use. Some
hosts have some of these installed, others do not. Some mom and pop
hosts force you to go through them to install mime types, if they will
do it at all. I have my domain on a good commercial host with an Apache
Unix server. All I have to do is go to the control panel, and there you
find a button for mime types. You just click this on, and a table gives
a list of any installed with a garbage can icon by each in case you
want to delete any. There is an add button at the bottom of the list
that brings up text boxes to install the extension such as .ram and the
mime type audio/x-pn-realaudio. You must also add another mime type for
the actual Real music with the extensiom .rm and mime type
audio/x-realaudio. Without these 2 mime types on the server, your .ram
may not be abe to redirect to your .rm music file on some browsers. If
you just use a link to the .rm music file without going through the
..ram redirector file, the music tries to download rather than stream.
On a streaming server, you usually can not reach the.rm music file at
all. With proper mime types on your server, you can then play the Real
media by linking to it as <a href="media.ram"
type="audio/x-pn-realaudio">PLAY</a>. You must use the complete URL for
the .ram, not a relative one. The type often is not necessary, but it
often makes linking more reliable for some browsers.
I have just been streaming some mp3 music files. Here you have to set
up mime types for the .mp3 and for the redirector file .m3u. The
redirector file .m3u can be a play list of several mp3s by just adding
the URL of each in the .m3u redirector file. Hitting enter after the
last URL line to make the cursor go to the start of the next blank line
makes the redirector file more reliabe for some browsers.
I am set up so that .mp3 and .m3u are selected in my Winamp player
options list, and .mpg is not selected on WMP, QT, or Real. Thus when I
go to one of my streaming mp3s, it comes up in Winamp and plays
automatically. If you have trouble in linking and don't want to
reconfigure your players, you can just copy the URL, bring up a player
that will play mp3s, select the file tab, select the enter url option,
and enter the url in that way. In this way I can force any of the
mentioned players to play the mp3 even though the primary choice is
Winamp.
Here is one of my streaming mp3 collections that has about 15 mp3s in
the redirector file. It thus plays all of the mp3s in the order of
their entry in the redirector file. It is recorded at 32 kbps, and will
stream on a good dialup connection. The temporary url is at
http://www.cwdjr.net/mpg/minsky/all.m3u . If you have a slow dalup
connection you might try a single song at
http://www.cwdjr.net/mpg/minsky/s13.m3u which is at 24 kbps or
http://www.cwdjr.net/mpg/minsky/vs13.m3u . which is at 16 kbps.
I have not been able to stream mp4s to the Winamp, although it will
play them. However I can stream mp4s to the Real player using a .ram
redirector file. I also have been able to stream ogg vorbis to the
Winamp, but you have to have a Winamp Ogg plugin to play this sound. I
also have streamed two other minor sound formats.
