any audio wizards know howto store *.smil files?

Tue Jul 25 21:12:09 UTC 2006

On Tue, 25 Jul 2006, Lars Eighner wrote:

> On Tue, 25 Jul 2006, Gary Kline wrote:
>
> >
> > 	Is there a way of saving *.[ra|ram|smil] or any real audio
> > 	type files locally?  I've poked around and haven't found any
> > 	means of saving real* stuff.
>
> If mplayer will play it, you can (probably) dump it with
> -dumpaudio -dumpfile <filename>
>
> dumpfile defaults to ./stream.dump

Actually, I tend to use the '-dumpstream' parameter instead of
'-dumpaudio', because that will get both audio and video. If all you want
is the audio part, however, then by all means go with '-dumpaudio'.

I'm not sure if mplayer can parse smil files. If you can't get that to
work, then just download the smil file (it is just a small text file), and
pick out the URLs for the media files, and hand those to mplayer. For
example, I just pulled this smil file from NPR:

<smil>
<meta name="title" content="Talk of the Nation - Tuesday, July 25, 2006"
/>
<meta name="author" content="http://www.npr.org/" />
<meta name="copyright" content="2006" />
<body>
<audio
src="rtsp://real.npr.org:80/real.npr.na-central/totn/20060725_totn_01.rm?v1st=&mt=2"
title="Will Syria Help Ease Mideast Turmoil?" author="Talk of the Nation -
Tuesday, July 25, 2006" copyright="2006" />
<audio
src="rtsp://real.npr.org:80/real.npr.na-central/totn/20060725_totn_02.rm?v1st=&mt=2"
title="Henry V and the 'Battle That Made England'" author="Talk of the
Nation - Tuesday, July 25, 2006" copyright="2006" />
<audio
src="rtsp://real.npr.org:80/real.npr.na-central/totn/20060725_totn_03.rm?v1st=&mt=2"
title="The Adaptations of Philip K. Dick" author="Talk of the Nation -
Tuesday, July 25, 2006" copyright="2006" />
<audio
src="rtsp://real.npr.org:80/real.npr.na-central/totn/20060725_totn_04.rm?v1st=&mt=2"
title="Is Third World War Talk Just Hyperbole?" author="Talk of the Nation
- Tuesday, July 25, 2006" copyright="2006" />
<audio
src="rtsp://real.npr.org:80/real.npr.na-central/totn/20060725_totn_05.rm?v1st=&mt=2"
title="Letters: Middle East Fighting, India.Arie" author="Talk of the
Nation - Tuesday, July 25, 2006" copyright="2006" />
</body>
</smil>

You can see the <audio> tags contain the good bits (in this case,
RTSP-style URLs). You can feed those URLs directly to mplayer, which in my
testing should work fine.

-Andy Reitz.