Great Hint! Worked as advertised. One thing I noticed, though (at least on the local NPR station stream: mms://204.13.1.19/WLRNstream ), is that the quality is markedly worse when played through QT and iTunes as compared to VLC. Of course, VLC gives me better quality than the Windows Media Player ever did . . .

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CBC uses .asx feeds (http://origin.www.cbc.ca/mrl2/livemedia/cbcr1-ottawa.asx for example). Since converting to Flip4Mac these do not work. I tried your procedure but this must require QTPro, as 'Save as...' is greyed for me. This might just push me over the top to get QTPro. Has anyone tried this with .asx feeds? or perhaps I need to dig further to find ... ???

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Any luck getting this to work with .asx streams?

I haven't been able to so far.

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Flip4Mac is known to have problems with ASX streams and their developers are working on it.

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ASX streams are indeed broken in Flip4Mac. From my analysis it would seem it is not parsing the XML in the ASX files correctly along with interpretation of the data within. You can always download an ASX file and open it up to get to the mms stream within.

They F4M team is aware of the situation and is surely working to resolve the problem.

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ASX streams are just lik mms, it is only a wrapper. I take as example the asx from the Belgian Radio Q-Music

• Launch the Terminal
• execute the command: wget http://www.q-music.be/asx/q_high.asx
• execute the command: less q_high.asx
• You'll see it's just an XML file:

  
  <ASX version = "3.0">
  <TITLE>Q WEBRADIO</TITLE>
          <ENTRY> 
                  <ABSTRACT>Q-music geluidsgalerij</ABSTRACT>
                  <TITLE>Q-music</TITLE>
                  <AUTHOR>VMMa - Q-music</AUTHOR>
                  <COPYRIGHT>(C) VMMa - Q-music</COPYRIGHT>
                  <BASE HREF="http://www.q-music.be/" />
                  <REF HREF = "http://breedband.telenet.be/var/telenet/storage/external_content/streaming/Qmusic_high_multicast.nsc" />
                  <REF HREF = "mms://clusterstreamhobo.telenet-ops.be/Qmusic_high" />
                  <Banner href="http://www.vtm.be/gfx/banners/telenetstream.gif">      
                          <MoreInfo href = "http://www.telenet.be/" />
                          <Abstract>Q-music streaming, powered by Telenet</Abstract>
                  </Banner>
          </ENTRY>
  </ASX>
  

• copy the mms:// url from the REF element: mms://clusterstreamhobo.telenet-ops.be/Qmusic_high
• play it.

Oh... Replace the URL by the URL of the ASX you want to hear :-)

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Thanks for the example station. Uptil now EVERY mms and asx feed I tried with the Flip4Mac codec failed (all played fine with Windows Media Player).

Thanks to your example I can see it should.

Unfortunately all the ones I want to listen to still don't work (both mms and asx).

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I just want to add that I'm also less than impressed with the capability of the Flip4Mac plugins. Almost nothing I've tried actually opens. This mms URL is one of the only things that has worked for me…

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You can play mms directly in itunes. just click
Advanced> open stream
enter the mms url
voila it plays.

What is driving me nuts is I can't figure out how to tell the OS to open mms: in itunes. it always defaults to Windows Media player.


A partticular mms url which has a streaming mp3 is giving me fits. VLC won play it, WM wont play it. quick time wont play it. But itunes will. If only I could get it to open in itunes from a link in safari.


instead safari deffaults to Windows Media playayer. when I remove windows media player from my disk, it defaults to flip4mac's WMV player which tries to to open it in Quicktime and also fails.

How do I set the default opener?




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Are you saying that iTunes will play any and all Windows Media streams this way? I tried my local NPR station ( mms://204.13.1.19/WLRNstream ) as well as the stream mentioned in the hint, and while both appeared in iTunes, neither would play.

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I suspect that mms: streams are different and need different apps to play them. You hint was more about how to decode a particular format thant how to open an mms: in itunes. itunes can open any stream. it just cant play all of them.


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Do this from the terminal:

osascript -e 'tell application "iTunes.app" to open location "http://wamu.ic.llnwd.net/stream/wamu_wamu"'

Replace the url with whatever you want.

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Just installed iTunes 7.0. Went a local radio station site where they offered listening to stream either by WMA or loading it into iTunes. I chose iTunes, of course. That popped it into the iTunes library. I tried to move it into the Radio category under the appropriate Stream type: Public, Jazz, Country, etc. I could find no way of dragging or copying/pasting it into the Radio category.
Then I tried to find a way of subscribing to new streams — ones not already listed in the Radio category, hoping that if I subscribed to this stream I could force it into the Radio category. NO way, Jose! It seems that they just haven't thought out a lot of the navigation yet, or maybe the stream is not the same type. I don't know, but there doesn't seem to be any way of adding new streams to the Radio category.

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No luck with this tip - Quicktime Pro will play the mms stream but the 'save' stays greyed out. I tried the following with VLC and Quicktime Pro and seemed to work OK:

1. Open VLC and select File > Open Network
2. Click on HTTP/FTP/MMS/RTSP and fill in the mms URL e.g. mms://81.20.48.50:80/PlanetRock?MSWMExt=.asf
3. Click on OK - note: ignore any error screens
4. Next, File > Save Playlist (format: Extended m3u), save the file and close VLC
5. Now, open the m3u file in Quicktime - it should play after buffering
6. Save the file as a .mov and that file will play/stream in iTunes

Note: VLC 0.8.6c, Quicktime Pro 7.5, iTunes 7.7.1

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Thanx that worked! You can now you AirFoil to send it to Airtunes.

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