Force VLC to select lower bandwidth stream ?

[mat_london]

Hi All,

I've been trying this for a few days now and think I know what the problem is, but not the answer.
I've got a Jumptv subscription and none of the Ubuntu moz plugins work embedded in the browser i.e. VLC, Mplayer or Totem.
However while the mplayer plugin is attempting to work it shows the url of the stream it is trying to access.
I've taken a screenshot while its doing this and copied the url into VLC, and get high quality streaming OK.
JumpTV appears to be multi-stream mms-over-http which offers several possible streams according to bandwidth.
Mplayer & Totem automatically select the tiny low bandwidth version which is about an inch square and VLC selects the very high bandwidth stream which is probably too high bandwidth for my connection as after about 20 seconds I get

[00000369] ffmpeg decoder error: more than 5 seconds of late video -> dropping frame (computer too slow ?)

And the picture locks after that.

With VLC you can see it choosing the highest possible stream for both audio and video like this:

[00000332] access_mms access: selecting stream[0x1] audio (69 kb/s)
[00000332] access_mms access: ignoring stream[0x2] audio (53 kb/s)
[00000332] access_mms access: ignoring stream[0x3] audio (26 kb/s)
[00000332] access_mms access: ignoring stream[0x4] audio (14 kb/s)
[00000332] access_mms access: selecting stream[0x5] video (940 kb/s)
[00000332] access_mms access: ignoring stream[0x6] video (321 kb/s)
[00000332] access_mms access: ignoring stream[0x7] video (102 kb/s)
[00000332] access_mms access: ignoring stream[0x8] video (52 kb/s)
[00000332] access_mms access: connection successful

My question is does anyone out there know how to force VLC to select a slightly lower bandwidth stream - the one I want is the 321 kb/s video stream [0x6]

I've been digging around for some time on this with no success.

Any thoughts or experience greatly appreciated.

Mat

[tsr]

Hi Mat,

try selecting VIEW / PLAYLIST in your VLC window, and check if you can select your stream of choice.
to me it sounds as if you are dealing with playlists, which, in turn, point to the actual stream addresses. if you ever encounter a stream URL which begins with "http://", then try using the console browser lynx (you might have to install it) like this:

Code: Select all

lynx -dump http://<url>

if you are lucky, you will then have some some HTML garbage in your terminal window, as well as some stream addresses (you can usually tell which of them is lq/hq by their names). common file extensions for playlists are .asx, .m3u and .ram. if you get extremely unreadable garbage, then i'm wrong on this.
in other news, on the first glance this JumpTV looks like a rip-off. but if you manage to get it running, i wouldnt mind if you offer a relay so that other, curious, people can see what JumpTV is really offering.

P.S.: Compare JumpTV to this: http://cgi.ebay.com/NEW-Amazing-Tiny-Te ... dZViewItem .
It took me ages to figure out that this guy is not trying to sell something interesting, but nothing but a playlist of free streamed channels (to which he is not related in any way, of course).

[mat_london]

I've solved this using mplayer:

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=307182

Cheers

Mat