kplayer/doc/en/howto-streams.docbook

<sect1 id="howto-streams">
<title>Online radio and TV</title>

<para>One of the major advantages of &kplayer; is the use of
<link linkend="howto-installation-mplayer">&mplayer;</link> as the multimedia
playing backend. It allows &kplayer; to support the widest variety of media
types and encodings. In addition to that, &kplayer; detects most playlist file
types and ensures that they are reproduced correctly.</para>

<sect2 id="howto-streams-types">
<title>Major stream types</title>

<para>The most widely used stream types for online media are RealMedia,
QuickTime, Windows Media and ShoutCast (MP3). &kplayer; will play all but very
few streams of those types. Choose <guimenuitem>Play URL...</guimenuitem> on
&kplayer;'s <guimenu>File</guimenu> menu, paste the stream address into the
<acronym>URL</acronym> box and select <guibutton>Open</guibutton>.
Alternatively, make sure your browser is configured to open &kplayer;
for the <acronym>MIME</acronym> types you would like to play with it, as well
as for <literal>rtsp:</literal>, <literal>pnm:</literal> and
<literal>mms:</literal> <acronym>URL</acronym>s. When you install &kplayer;,
&konqueror; configuration is done automatically, you
then just need to open <guilabel>File Association</guilabel> settings in
&konqueror; or in &kcontrolcenter; and move &kplayer; to the top of the list
for those file types that already had another program associated with them,
including the special types under the <literal>uri</literal> section.
Then you can simply click an <literal>http:</literal>, <literal>rtsp:</literal>,
<literal>pnm:</literal> or <literal>mms:</literal> link to your media, and
&kplayer; will start up and play it.</para>

<para>If a stream has meta information embedded in it, &kplayer; will extract it
and display it in the <link linkend="parts-library">multimedia library</link>,
and if it finds the station name, it will also display it in the
<link linkend="parts-title-bar">title bar</link> and on the
<link linkend="parts-toolbar-playlist">current playlist</link>. Some music
streams also provide the name of the song currently being played. &kplayer; will
then display it in the title bar and on the current playlist instead of the
station name.</para>

</sect2>

<sect2 id="howto-streams-playlists">
<title>Playlist files</title>

<para>If the file a URL points to is a playlist,
<link linkend="howto-installation-mplayer">&mplayer;</link> needs a special
option to be able to play that file correctly. &kplayer; tries to detect
playlist files by looking at the file extension. If the extension is
<literal>ram</literal>, <literal>smi</literal>, <literal>smil</literal>,
<literal>rpm</literal>, <literal>asx</literal>, <literal>pls</literal>,
<literal>m3u</literal> or <literal>strm</literal>, and the protocol is
<literal>file</literal>, <literal>http</literal>, <literal>http_proxy</literal>,
<literal>ftp</literal> or <literal>smb</literal>, then &kplayer; passes the
playlist option to &mplayer;. But sometimes a playlist file may have a different
extension, or a file that is not a playlist may have one of those extensions.
In those cases playback will initially fail, and you will need to open the
<link linkend="properties-general">File Properties dialog</link> from the
<guimenu>File</guimenu> menu and set the <guilabel>Playlist</guilabel> option
correctly.</para>

</sect2>

<sect2 id="howto-streams-cache">
<title>Cache size</title>

<para>By default &kplayer; lets &mplayer; choose an optimal cache size, which
will work in almost all cases. But if you play a low bitrate media like a radio
station, it may take a while to fill the cache. In that case you can lower the
cache setting to 128 or even 64 kilobytes if &mplayer; does not do it
automatically. You can do that on the <guilabel>Advanced</guilabel> page for an
individual stream in the <link linkend="properties-advanced">File Properties
dialog</link>, or globally in <link linkend="settings-advanced">&kplayer;
Settings</link>. Alternatively, you can set a lower minimum cache size required
to start playback, the default one being 20%. That setting goes into the
<guilabel>Additional command line parameters</guilabel> field on the same
<guilabel>Advanced</guilabel> page, for example
<literal>-cache-min 5</literal>.</para>

</sect2>

<sect2 id="howto-streams-embedded">
<title>Embedded streams</title>

<para>A lot of times a media stream will be embedded as an object into a web
page. &kplayer; supports that and will play the stream if it is configured as
the default player for that media type. But it is recommended that you right
click on the web page object and choose <guimenuitem>Start
&kplayer;</guimenuitem>. You will then get better interface and more
options.</para>

</sect2>

<sect2 id="howto-streams-slaves">
<title>Playing through HTTP I/O Slave</title>

<para>In &mplayer; 1.0-pre4 there was a bug that made it impossible to play
<acronym>HTTP</acronym> <acronym>URL</acronym>s that had <acronym>URL</acronym>
encodable characters like a space in them. For those <acronym>URL</acronym>s
you can turn on the <guilabel>Use KIOSlave</guilabel> option in the
<link linkend="properties-advanced">File Properties</link>. &kplayer; will then
use the <acronym>HTTP</acronym> <acronym>I/O</acronym> Slave to play the file,
sending data to &mplayer; through a named pipe.</para>

</sect2>

<sect2 id="howto-streams-finding">
<title>Where to find stations</title>

<para>There is no single best resource for finding online radio and TV stations.
<ulink url="http://www.vtuner.com/">VTuner</ulink> online directory is pretty
good but not very complete.
<ulink url="http://www.radios.com.br/">Radios.com.br</ulink> is rather spammy
but more complete, their directory of online
<ulink url="http://www.radios.com.br/novo/tvs.htm">TV</ulink> and
<ulink url="http://www.radios.com.br/novo/inter.htm">radio</ulink> stations from
all over the world probably is the most complete on the Internet today. Finally,
<ulink url="http://www.tvradioworld.com/">TVRadioWorld</ulink> is an excellent
resource for finding on-the-air <acronym>TV</acronym> and radio stations (online
or not), and it links to online streams for some of them.</para>

</sect2>

<sect2 id="howto-streams-recording">
<title>Recording streams</title>

<para>Open <menuchoice><guimenu>File</guimenu>
<guimenuitem>Properties</guimenuitem></menuchoice> for the stream you want to
record, go to the
<link linkend="properties-advanced">Advanced page</link> and enter
<option>-dumpstream</option> into the <guilabel>Additional command line
arguments</guilabel> field. Then start playing the stream.
A <filename>stream.dump</filename> file will then be created in the current
directory. You can later rename it with the correct extension. Or add
<userinput><option>-dumpfile</option>
<filename><replaceable>filename.ext</replaceable></filename></userinput> to the
same <guilabel>Additional command line arguments</guilabel> field. The option in
that field have to be separated with spaces, and the file name must not have
spaces in it.</para>

</sect2>

</sect1>