Scrambled Channel

Listening to 2ser’s asf stream with Ubuntu

One thing I really miss about Sydney is listening to the fantastic community radio station radio 2ser. Staffed largely by volunteers, 2ser delivers great music, arts, news and other community programming. Salvation is at hand as they do provide an internet stream. The bad news is that it’s in Microsoft’s ASF format which poses a bit of a challenge for users of Linux and other free operating systems. However, I’ve managed to play the stream on my Ubuntu desktop - here’s how:

The instructions on 2ser’s streaming page read:

# if you are having difficulties try opening the stream directly from within Windows Media Player.

to do this use the following steps:

open the Windows Media Player application. this will ONLY work in Windows Media Player
# go to the FILE menu and choose OPEN URL
# type the following - http://138.25.162.211:8080
# this should connect you directly to the stream

OK, so I added a bit of emphasis but it’s not real encouraging is it? Happily you can play the stream using mplayer and the w32codecs. If you’re using Ubuntu you can install mplayer using the command:

sudo apt-get install mplayer

Installing the w32codecs package is a litte more complicated. The w32codecs package isn’t available as part of the Official Ubuntu distribution as the software that plays these proprietary file formats isn’t technically free (see the Ubuntu documenation). However, you can get them from various unofficial sources. Add the following line to the file /etc/apt/sources.list (i.e. edit it as root with your favourite editor):

deb http://packages.freecontrib.org/ubuntu/plf/ dapper free non-free

Next update your apt-get sources by typing the following:

sudo apt-get install update

Now the w32codecs package should be installable by typing:

sudo apt-get install w32codecs

Now mplayer should have everything it needs to play the stream. Open mplayer by typing:

gmplayer http://138.25.162.211:8080

Alternatively start mplayer from your Applications->Sound and Video menu and select Open->Play URL and enter http://138.25.162.211:8080 - it might throw up an error message but the stream should begin to play.

Please let me know if you have any difficulties and I’ll try to help you.

Note: I have been unable to get the stream to play from the webpage using either the gstreamer or mplayer plugins for firefox. Let ne know if you have any luck.

Tags: geek, linux, music, ubuntu

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