I'm trying to listen to "97.1fm - The Drive" (www.wdrv.com), a Chicago area radio station, using firefox and gxine. That is, to play the stream, firefox calls gxine, and then gxine should play the stream. Problem is, when gxine comes up, I get an error box that says, "xine engine failed to start. No demuxer found - stream format unrecognized."

I think this is a problem specific to my configuration for this one station, since as I type this I am listening to KWAR at Wartburg College using gxine. (KWAR was one of the presets included with gxine.)

Any ideas how I could troubleshoot this?

Okay, I did a little more digging around on the station's web site. It looks like I'm not going to be listening to their station on my linux boxen. Here's what they say about listening live:

That's okay. While trying to figure this out, I've been listening to KWAR, and it has really grown on me. Not a hometown station, but pretty cool anyway.

hussar beat me to starting this thread today.

gxine seems to be absolutely capable of streaming audio and video. But for lack of a better term it seems to be lazy. Right now I'm streaming WEEI sports radio (www.weei.com) and it's working fine. This stream always crashes gxine once or twice on opening and I have to CTRL+ALT+ESC kill gxine, F5 refresh the little "streamer" popup, and gxine will restart and play the stream just fine. This initial crash is pretty much standard for all streams that start.

On the other hand, there are some other radio stations that exhibit a very different behavior that has now become intolerable. A prime example of said stream is the one for www.630wpro.com (you have to have a free login to Right Now Radio streaming service to use it). This radio stream is completely annoying in that it works about 20% of the time and is never constant. This morning, right before I started the WEEI stream, here is the nonsense I suffered which is a perfect example of this problem behavior:

Went to the WPRO web site and clicked the Live stream link at the top, got the streamer popup, logged in, got gxine when it refreshed after login which did nothing. Same exact procedure as WEEI. In this case, gxine didn't outright crash but the stream just shut down. So I clicked Play, got a "Connecting to MMS server..." message and the stream shut down. I clicked Stop and then clicked Play, same message. Did it again, got stuck on "Buffering... 6%" for about 20 seconds and then the stream went ahead and played.

Yay!.... nope.

About 25 minutes later, the stream just stopped with no warning or messages. So begrudgingly I go back to gxine and click stop, play, stop, play, and again on the third time I got the "Buffering... 6%" message. This time it stops at 30% and I get the following Error:That was it; that's the message I got and the stream died. Now with WEEI, that stream works fine and is a free-subscription service as well. It works as well as 760 KFMB San Diego. It might complain a little when it starts up but otherwise it works just fine. But most of the stations I try to stream behave much like the WPRO stream where it's a chore just to get it to work at all and it only streams for maybe 1-30 minutes before quietly going into that good night, only to return when it damn well feels like it.

All this behavior goes for any stream, audio or video doesn't matter... If it streams it does this. I'm almost afraid to stream anything new because I just don't know what kind of BS I'm going to have to go through for any particular stream. I'm certainly not going to go ahead with the 2 or 3 pay subscription services I'd really like because I might just be wasting my money.

So this problem is certainly not new. I never really streamed in Fedora but I can't remember any time where I had much success with it then. I'm using Slackware 11 now with all the current patches (Firefox 1.5.8, btw) with a full install. Kernel doesn't seem to matter but I'm using 2.6.18.5. If it's necessary I can create a list of packages that I've installed since I've installed Slackware 11 (most I compiled myself) but I don't think that any of it conflicts with (g)xine especially considering that any media that exists locally and isn't streamed works perfectly fine. I have in /usr/lib/codecs the Mplayer codecs that I untarred in there myself from mplayerhq and (g)xine is pointing to that folder for the codecs. I tried the Windows codecs and then reverted back to the Linux codecs (which just work better).

And yes it all works fine in Windoze...

Any thoughts?

check out the "mplayer plug-in" if you have mplayer.

See that's just it. I don't particularly want to have mplayer on my system. I don't want to fall into a situation where I have a separate program for every task I want to accomplish. Is mplayer really such a superior media program? If so then why isn't the base program installed by default? I understand why the codecs aren't but that's easy to fix.

I guess I'm just a little frustrated when questions are asked about media like the one in this thread and almost always there is more than one response that basically says "forget your media player and get mplayer." Is it just me or is that just a lazy solution? It seems like I don't really have so much of a choice but to install mplayer because everyone uses it and so very little is known about gxine and I'm just SOL.

So I'll change my question to this: If I'm able to get mplayer to work successfully (which apparently I will) can I remove the gxine package without having to worry if other things are going to be broken? I know Amarok uses xine-lib but my knowledge on that really ends there. I don't want to have 4 or 5 media programs that can handle 2 or 3 tasks so when I get mplayer suited to my needs I won't need gxine cluttering up my system.

I'll report back.

EDIT: Reporting back as promised...

I installed mplayer and fooled around with it. I tried compiling myself from mplayerhq sources, I used Alien Bob's pkg and slackbuild (both css and noncss) and Ken's from linuxpackages.net and I have the very same problem from all three sources. It works but trying to change the volume after it plays something crashes the program outright. It also starts every file it plays, whether alone or in a playlist, at full volume. Highly annoying but it does stream with the mplayer plugin.

Though I actually ended up doing exactly what I didn't want to do by installing a new program to hang around and do nothing except what some other program is supposed to do, I can view/listen to all my media reliably with gxine and view/listen to streams with mplayer. Hopefully this arrangement keeps working as well... I'm leary of programs that crash when I do something I'm supposed to be able to do. I'm really not down for hunting down bugs and such at this point...

While I've worked around my problem I haven't really solved it. Any suggestions are appreciated. Thanks ahead of time.