Hi,

I am looking at a way of finding the duration of past recorded BBC radio program. This programs are streamed but have finite duration that can
known before accessing them.
A CLI command would be best.

A stream for example is rstp://rmv8.bbc.net.uk/radio4/factual/wed0902_20050803

I read ffplay can do that with the option -stats but I cannot make it work.
I am not sure ffplay support real audio format actually

ffplay version 0.4.9-pre1
$ ffplay -stats rstp://rmv8.bbc.net.uk/radio4/factual/wed0902_20050803
rstp://rmv8.bbc.net.uk/radio4/factual/wed0902_20050803: Error while opening file

The only I found so far is to stream the file via realplay (version 8 here) which
displays the total duration.

Any idea?

Thanks. Regards

{edit added
final duration keyword
http://www.planetpenguin.de/manpage-1-ffplay.html
Will try the -rtp_tcp option that I do not have at home on my manpage.

Also helix do have some kind of implementation of stream duration,

Hi Emmanuel,

I was looking for the same thing, and found your post.
I'm not sure if you're still looking, but I've just found a way to do it: trplayer, which is a command-line add-on to RealPlayer 8.

So first, you need to install RealPlayer 8: http://proforma.real.com/real/player/blackjack.html
(I downloaded the .bin version, so I could keep RealPlayer 10 installed)
Install to /usr/lib/RealPlayer8 (see http://tinyurl.com/9jhrb for more details)

Then download trplayer: http://tinyurl.com/9jhrb
Here, I used the RPM (I'm on Mandrake, btw)

Finally, you can run:
trplayer -l -c -t 2 rtsp://rmv8.bbc.net.uk/bbc7/0800_mon.ra

The "-l -c" option does the trick of displaying the length in a compact format, and "-t 2" will stop after 2 seconds (even before starting playing).

I hope this helps

Best,

Ben

Hi Sibidi,

I was still interested. Thanks a lot. Terrific post I should say.
I already had realplayer 8, so it was a breese to add the rpm for trplayer (~23 kb).

It does work as you said (in mandy as well)

I had heard the name trplayer but never experimented with it. I did
not know it was a line command.

Anyway, thanks again.
regards

PS: I am still curious to see if there is a solution with a newer
version of ffplay if it ever support real audio format

Glad I could help