playing streams with username and password

DaggyStyle · Watchman Joined: 22 Mar 2006 Posts: 5910

I got some channels that needs an input of username and password inorder to be played, tried with mplayer, vlc and xine but no luck
how can I play these streams?
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Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity and I'm not sure about the former - Albert Einstein

BradN · Posted: Fri May 30, 2008 12:11 am Post subject:

Assuming these are http streams (or maybe even mms, I don't know), you can usually do a trick like:

http://username:password@someserver.com/mystream.asx

Hope this solves it

DaggyStyle · Watchman Joined: 22 Mar 2006 Posts: 5910

not working, vlc, mplayer and kaffeine report "no known plugin"

anything else that can help me?
_________________
Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity and I'm not sure about the former - Albert Einstein

BradN · Posted: Sat Jun 21, 2008 1:10 am Post subject:

One thing I can think of is running mplayer from a console window - it may give additional debugging information there that may help diagnosing what's going on. As far as I know, username and password are passed directly in the URL as I described, so there should be no reason it wouldn't work like that.

Sometimes a stream will initially return a file that specifies a new URL to follow to - I've found that many linux media players don't handle this properly and just fail. If this is the case, try using wget (described below) to download this first file, open it in a text editor, grab out the new URL, and try that.

Another possibility is that the stream server is set up to only serve the media stream to, eg, windows media player or other "known" media programs (via the http user agent), so you could as a debugging measure, use wget and specify it to send windows media player's user agent (and you should be able to for sure use this to specify the username and password). If you decide to use this method as a permanent solution, you can sometimes start playing a partially downloaded file (so it's a bit stream-ish), but ymmv. wget will only work for http style streams (not mms or any other weird things). The -U option of wget is used to set the user agent, such as:

DaggyStyle · Watchman Joined: 22 Mar 2006 Posts: 5910

but the question is, how much should I download when I try to play a live stream?
_________________
Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity and I'm not sure about the former - Albert Einstein

BradN · Posted: Sun Jun 22, 2008 1:49 am Post subject:

Hmm, I'm not sure exactly what you're asking?

DaggyStyle · Watchman Joined: 22 Mar 2006 Posts: 5910

what should I put under "my favorite player"? the path?
_________________
Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity and I'm not sure about the former - Albert Einstein

BradN · Posted: Thu Jun 26, 2008 2:45 pm Post subject:

If you mean for wget, it's whatever user agent say, windows media player uses (I don't know it offhand). Otherwise I don't know what you mean.

DaggyStyle · Watchman Joined: 22 Mar 2006 Posts: 5910