I have been quite successful in getting most everything in my RH9 set up properly, except
for one thing..I seem to be having a problem with listening to Internet Radio feeds.

I have a pretty kewl station I listen to quite often, and it broadcasts through SHOUTcast which is just a broadcast streaming server. Its perfectly legal, and they send out a PLS file format. When I examine the file association, it points to XMMS. Again this is good. When I click on the connect link on the website (www.streamingsoundtracks.com) sure enough XMMS launches, but no sound. When I click the "play" button, I get some vague message about Red Hat disabling something due to licensing conflicts and restrictions.

My question: Am I just screwed because RedHat wont let me listen to any MP3 or streaming format? Or is there some other solution that I could try. I cant imagine that RedHat would just say ...uhm..NO you cant listen to any MP3s, seeing that all the files are pre-assigned!

Thanks alot for the help in advance.
Kork

I can personally recommend 'xine' as an MP3/Video player (and its 'kaffiene' interface).

http://xinehq.de/

RedHat didn't include MP3 support because the MPEG format is copyrighed, and isn't free.

There's a package with all the major sound and video codecs on the xine site (or at least there's links anyway). Once you've downloaded and installed the codecs there should be a way to get xmms to play MP3s with those codecs as well as xine.

(There's RPMs with the 'win32' codecs (mp3, real, quicktime etc) here:
http://cambuca.ldhs.cetuc.puc-rio.br/xine/
at the bottom of the page)

Hope that helps.

Dave

Dave,

Thanks very much for your recommendation. I will take a look at that.

I finally got to the root (no pun intended) of the issue last night. It is, as you say, an issue with the MP3 itself. Even though RH9 ships with XMMS, the plugin to play any form of MP3 format, including the PLS streaming format isnt included.

I found the plugin for XMMS at www.gurulabs.com/downloads.html and downloaded the RPMs and installed them. XMMS now plays the stream just fine.

However, there is still an issue in that the site I listen to is an MP3Pro site, which effectively doubles the quality of the sound, but uses the same bandwidth. In the Windows world the plugin that is used is the Thompson MP3Pro plugin for Winamp. Apparently this is not available for Linux/XMMS yet...but..maybe soon??

Thanks,
Kork

May I bump this?
I also have an internet radio site which just went MP3PRO, and the stream quality is most definately noticable between systems.

Thanks.