bpa;330691 Wrote: 
> How can a warning be generated when the site itself says the m4a file is
> audio and not video !
> 
> The "assault on the ears" is the fault of the decoder which should not
> be taking a video stream and making it audible. Mplayer can be set to
> discard video in m4a files - what decoder are you using ?


To be honest, I don't know what decoder is being used for podcasts....
I have a standard install of 7.1 on Windows Server 2003 (Windows Home
Server) with the addition of the latest AlienBBC and a lame
executable.

I guess my point is that I have a pretty vanilla install, so I have
whatever decoder comes with that release, with no changes (unless the
addition of AlienBBC / lame have affected things). If attempting to
play a popular podcast on a stable, live release of SC is resulting in
this issue, I thought it must be worthwhile to look into some way of
preventing the problem, or at least warning the user of the potential
problem.

I'm not very familiar with Podcast related file formats, but after a
bit more investigation, it looks like m4a files would normally be
expected to contain more than just audio (else mp3 would probably have
been used instead). So, I think it be true to say the following:

  
- The .m4a format is designed to carry more than just audio.
  Therefore, where it is used, it is likely that the file will contain
  additional, non-audio data.
- SqueezeCenter will happily accept an XML file that links to .m4a
  files as acceptable podcasts
- At least some .m4a files with extra information will produce
  nothing but a very loud and unpleasant noise when they are played via
  Squeezecenter.
  

If there is some config file that needs a change to persuade the
decoder to strip out non audio data, I'm happy to do that. It doesn't
help anyone else who might hit this problem though, so I'm thinking it
would be great if we could come up with a way to make this situation
less likely to occur......


-- 
SadGamerGeek
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