Problems with streaming audio

Howard Bornstein howard.bornstein at gmail.com
Sun Sep 11 12:54:38 EDT 2005


I'm a member of Woodstock Fire Department in upstate New York. Some of
our members have trouble hearing Fire Dispatch through their pagers
(audio radios) because the area is heavily wooded.

So I've been streaming the Fire Dispatch audio over the internet so
members with bad radio reception can still hear the dispatch. They use
whatever media player they want for their platform--iTunes, Windows
Media Player, RealPlayer, etc. They all seem to work fine, but there
is a problem with all of them. If I have to take the server down for
any reason, the media playes promptly switch from play mode to stop
mode. Unless the fire and rescue members look at the transport
controls of their player, they won't know that it's changed from play
to stop, since the radio dispatch occurs infrequently. Unlike
streaming music, which is immediately noticeable when it stops,
dispatch goes for long periods of time with no transmissions.

To deal with this, I decided to build a cross-platform media player in
Rev which would detect when the server was down and restart the
player.

Unfortunately, I'm having a few problems I didn't anticipate. (so far
testing only in Mac OS 10.4)

1) I want to use my own controls to start and stop the player, rather
than use the Quicktime controller. At first this worked fine. For some
reason now it's not working at all. If I use the command <start player
"stream"> the player says "connecting" but never does. However, if I
click the start button on the controller, it connects fine. Why
doesn't the start command work? (Is this related to bug 1239?)

2) In order to determine if the server is down, I need to tell if the
player is receiving an audio stream. I've been using the currenttime
to test this. I check to see if the currenttime changes over a 1
second interval. If it's the same, I assume the server has stopped.
Sometimes, however, audio will stop playing while the currenttime goes
on its merry way. I need a *reliable* way to tell if the player is
receiving data from the stream. Does anyone have a suggestion for
this?

3) Finally, the player seems to generate certain messages right in the
player bar--things like "connecting", "negotiating", "connection
failed", etc. Is there a way I can intercept these messages in Rev?

Any help would be appreciated.

-- 
Regards,

Howard Bornstein
-----------------------
www.designeq.com



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