John Kelly's Mystery Train

Apogee wrote: »

1. Google for 'StreamBox VCR', download and install.
2. Right click to download the 'listen to' link as the .smil file.
3. Open the .smil file with Notepad and copy the URL within e.g. rtsp://blahblah/somefile.rm
4. Paste the link into StreamBox VCR and away you go.

I downloaded Streambox and tried it out of curiosity, and it does seem to work, just very very slowly and rather annoyingly dropped the connection many many times with a time-out error. After 15 mins and numerous dropped connections I have managed to download 6.5Mb (70%) of the 9.5Mb rm file

It seems that rte's server is setup to only feed you a small bit of the file for buffering and then wait before sending you more (I'm guessing here)

So to compare my method of using 'mplayer' from the command-line in windows vs. Streambox, I tried a second time using Both methods at the same time - my method took 24 seconds to download the rm file from the rte server whereas I'm still waiting for Streambox to complete the download 15 mins later

It's starts off with an impressive enough 1.4Mbps connection, but then the speed rapidly tails off to 0 [Zero) Bps

Now it's possible I haven't set Streambox up correctly and need to re-jig the settings to make it work as it should, (increasing time-out limit for example) but going on the evidence I've seen so far, it's kind of annoying what with having to monitor the DL and keep telling it to re-connect

Someone with more experience of Streambox might be able to streamline the process though

ON EDIT: I set it to 'unlimited attempts' and REDUCED the 'time-out' and the 'retry-on-idle' settings and that improved matters quite a bit - but it still comes nowhere near 24 seconds- still takes nearly 3 or 4 mins, with 19 connection attempts, to grab a file that mplayer grabs in 24 seconds - like I said earlier it could be that I have not set Streambox up correctly

tried it again today - this time I'm getting a fairly continuous 16.5kbps stream, which seems to be close to real-time' - so I expect it'll be about an hour before I get the whole show.
So like I said - it works, but it's slow
I'd be curious to hear what type of speeds you're getting - perhaps it's got something to do with my connection?

regarding the mplayer method: you can install mplayer,cygwin&Lame into either windows or Linux - works well in both - it's all command-line but it's not complicated to use - the commands are fairly easy to decipher once you get the hang of it - and you can easily set up a batch (.bat) file in windows to grab several shows at once - all you have to do is adjust the file names slightly - there is no random/unknown 'pid' for you to track-down, like there is with more recent RTE radio shows, so it's simply a matter of changing the dates in the file names, and you can easily automate the process somewhat.
Once you know the structure of the filename you can simply relpace the dates portion for all the shows - so you don't even need to download the '.smil' file to grab the rtsp link - all you need to know is the date of the show you want to grab.

So far its taken me 10 mins to grab 10% of the stream with streambox, so if you're planning on grabbing all the available shows, all 8 months worth (8x4x5), that's going to take a while using streambox