Snooker

[zaphod]

hi all

A year ago I was using get_iplayer to watch the World Snooker. My machine is
seriously underpowered by current standards and still is but I found that I
could use it on the embedded URL's on the BBC website, for example...

get_iplayer --type=tv --url "http://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/0/snooker/21069651"

...to create a file that I could then watch using VLC (from videolan), even
while the file was still being appended to. That is the other problem which I
might as well go into now, does anyone know a player that will keep checking the
length of the file so far and present a slider to the user where the start of
the recording is at the left end and NOW is ALWAYS at the right? On VLC you can
only randomly access points in time up to the time the file was opened by VLC.

At one point I even had both snooker tables being recorded simultaneously, which
uses negligable CPU, and was watching at least one using VLC, in good quality,
close to freeview Standard Definition quality. In comparison, watching it via
the Chrome browser (Windows XP), which uses an Adobe dll as an underlying
component (as I discovered with Process Explorer), is unwatchable, not enough
frames per second. My machine is 1800MHz Athlon, Graphics an ATI-all-in-wonder
128 Rage Pro. I can play an MPG created by a Kworld USB freeview stick using
about 30% CPU. The mp4 files from get_iplayer use a similar amount of CPU I
believe.

THE PROBLEM - if rtmpdump failed for whatever reason, because it was a live
stream it obviously just has to give up and let the calling process deal with
it. Could get_iplayer just try again and for simplicity create a new file with
an incrementing filename? There would be a loss of continuity which would not be
acceptable for a film maybe, but ok for a live event, the existence of multiple
filenames would inform the user that a problem had occurred.

Only today rtmpdump went nuts and just kept repeating an error message without
exiting though, may be a problem, not sure which version