Jason was an Opensource.com staff member and Red Hatter from 2013 to 2022. This profile contains his work-related articles from that time. Other contributions can be found on his personal account.
Jason was an Opensource.com staff member and Red Hatter from 2013 to 2022. This profile contains his work-related articles from that time. Other contributions can be found on his personal account.
Authored Comments
This is also a great time to pitch explainshell.com - if you ever read a long command like this on an article and want more detail about what each switch means, it's great. It saves slogging through some of the more tortuous man pages.
https://explainshell.com/explain?cmd=mplayer+-nocache+-afm+ffmpeg+http%…
Sure. Honestly, MPlayer is one of those tools that's complex enough that, once I get the winning combination of options going, I don't touch them, even if one is perhaps superfluous. :)
-nocache turns off caching. Caching could actually be useful, depending on your situation, but one thing I use internet radio streams of local stations a good bit for is basketball coverage, which I want synced with my TV at least reasonably well so I can get audio that's in time with the game (think of it as a Dick Vitale avoidance strategy). But do what works for you.
-afm directs which audio codec to use. I set this to ffmpeg because I've had the best luck with it working with a broad set of filetypes / encoding types. Depending on what kind of stream you're consuming, different songs could actually be encoded in different ways, and ffmpeg seems to be able to handle everything that my preferred stations throw at it. But again, your situation may vary: all I can say is, works for me!