amiga-news.de - Mediathek V0.3 for all Amiga systems

22.Aug.2023

Mediathek V0.3 for all Amiga systems
In early August, we presented Jörg Renkert's Hollywood implementation of the MediathekView program for Amiga systems. Five days ago he updated to version 0.3. It would have been quick to write a report about it, but we wanted to test the program in more detail, especially with regard to streaming.

In addition to some adjustments and bug fixes, the information on a selected program is now no longer displayed on the bottom right-hand side, but on the left-hand side in a separate tab, which is automatically switched to when a program is selected.

In our first article, streaming did not work at all, although we were told by Edgar Schwan, among others, that it worked for him. So let's take another closer look. Jörg Renkert has clarified the usage again in his German instructions: next to the path to the preferred player, a "%u" must be appended, which transfers the link of the stream to the program.

One thing can be said in advance: Emotion is the only video player that could stream all videos. On the X5000, however, it only makes sense to use the low quality, as the picture and sound are no longer synchronized with the medium quality. Incidentally, ORF programs can neither be streamed nor downloaded. All fields are grayed out. There are two different MPlayer versions for AmigaOS 4 in the OS4Depot:

Liveforit-MPlayerNG, based on MPlayer 1.1.1
MickJT-MPlayer, based on MPlayer 1.3.0, in two versions:
- for Radeon HD graphics cards (released in 2018)
- for Radeon RX graphics cards (released in 2023)

The Liveforit-MPlayerNG for AmigaOS 4 cannot stream broadcasts any more than Fabien Coeurjoly's port of MPlayer 1.1.1 for MorphOS (the only one that runs without AltiVec and can therefore be used on the AmigaOne X5000).

First I checked which version of MickJT-MPlayer was installed: of course the wrong one, the one for HD graphics cards...Perfect, error found, I thought. So I unpacked the RX version, read the readme (!): I found the note there that I also needed the older version for HD graphics cards (the full archive). Good, also unpacked. Then copied the (supposed) RX version to the disk in my existing directory and saw that the archives are otherwise no different. Started the media library again, selected the program, let MPLayer stream - error message again:

Can't be true... Should Edgar have swindled me? Of course not! ;) So out of desperation (or cleverness? ;) I chose another program and tried again. And what happened? I could suddenly hear sound! And read in the text of the output window that no window could be opened using the "comp_yuv2" driver. Why was that? And slowly it dawned on me: when unpacking the HD version of the MickJT player, I had probably overwritten the RX version...stupid mistake! So, I unpacked the RX archive again, and lo and behold: the application now had an "RX" at the end. So, I copied it over, selected the transmission, timidly pressed the "E" button, and?

There you go! :) To be on the safe side, I asked Daniel Westerberg again, who had uploaded the RX version. The only difference between the HD and RX version is actually only in the replacement of the graphics card driver used: the HD version from 2018 searches for the "RadeonHD.chip" at startup and refuses to open a window if it is not found or the corresponding graphics card is present. He simply replaced this "HD" with "RX" in the exe file.

When I tried it out further, however, I noticed that there are programs for which MickJT-MPlayer still refuses to play with the above error message. If you want to see an example: just enter the search term "Garten" and then select the BR program "Bauerngärten". It could not be the codec used, as both working and non-functioning programs used "libavformat version 57.25.100". I contacted Edgar Schwan again and the clever fox found the reason: the "Bauerngärten" movie is on the server "https://cdn-storage.br.de". Edgar had tried to download it using the "wget" tool. The answer he got was:

'The certificate owner does not match the hostname "cdn-storage.br.de"'.

He then switched off the certificate check and called the following command in the shell:

wget --no-check-certificate https://cdn-storage.br.de/MUJIuUOVBwQIbtCCBLzGiLC1uwQoNA4p_AQS/_-dS/_Akp5-Fd571S/d2cdb4c7-b7e3-4b0a-89ec-1a43bdf5d273_E.mp4

And: now it works! By the way, also with the LiveForIt-MPlayer! So if it is possible to deactivate this certificate check in the media library, you could then also use the LiveForIt-MPlayer and (presumably) also stream under MorphOS.

The only remaining question is why the DvPlayer cannot stream: as Hans de Ruiter (who gave the DvPlayer hardware acceleration) told us, in his opinion the libavformat library used should in principle be able to stream over the network. The use of this feature could be added in future versions of DvPlayer. (dr)

[News message: 22. Aug. 2023, 06:05] [Comments: 0]
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