Playing BBC R3 FLAC files recorded by nightly VLC

RS richard22j at zoho.com
Sat Aug 5 09:30:26 PDT 2017


A few days ago Vangelis kindly told us how to record the BBC R3 FLAC streams 
using a recent nightly build of VLC.  Has anyone been able to play the 
recordings other than through a software player such as VLC?

I can play a recording with the nightly build of VLC.  The speakers on my PC 
are adequate, but not suitable for listening to music, so it defeats the 
object if I can't play the recordings on anything else.

If I try to play it with VLC v2.2.6 (Umbrella) there is silence.  The 
Statistics tab shows the same number of lost buffers as decoded blocks and 0 
played buffers.  The SanDisk Clip Jam claims to be able to play FLAC, 
although there is a warning on the web site that the v1.12 firmware is 
needed.  It plays the Hallelujah.flac test file from The Sixteen (and it 
used to play it with the v1.10 firmware) but it will not play the BBC FLAC 
recording.  It displays, "Unsupported file format".

It is in an OGG container.  I tried using ffmpeg v3.2.4 with -acodec=copy to 
remultiplex it to a FLAC container.  I got an error message
Could not write header for output file #0 (incorrect codec parameters ?): 
Invalid data found when processing input

I then tried converting the FLAC in an OGG container to FLAC in a FLAC 
container.  I got a huge number of error messages of the form
[flac at 04fdc8a0] Application provided invalid, non monotonically increasing 
dts to muxer in stream 0:  122872320 >= 122867712
I thought something had gone wrong so I stopped it.  I then noticed the 
output file size was not zero, but about 5MByte.  I discovered I could play 
it and it was about 42s long.  I then let the conversion run to completion. 
I got a final error message
Error while decoding stream #0:0: Invalid argument
followed by the usual size, time, bit rate and speed indications.

I found the output file was complete and I could play it in VLC v2.2.6 and 
the SanDisk Clip Jam.

The command I used for the conversion was
ffmpeg -i=<infile>.ogg -f=flac -sample_fmt=s16 <outfile>.flac





More information about the get_iplayer mailing list