The RealAudio format is defined as RTSP in Filetypes and the RTSP rules only govern RealAudio files/streams.
There are 3 rules for transcoding the RealAudio into WAV, MP3 and Flac. If all 3 formats are enabled then Slimserver will choose Flac. I had assumed if Flac was disabled that Slimserver would choose MP3 next but in fact (as you discovered) the order of preference is Flac, WAV, MP3. In other words Simserver prefers lossless over compression. Flac and WAV preserve a decoded stream (in this case RealAudio) whereas MP3 will recompress the audio and you will have some audio degradation. Bandwidth requirements vary with MP3 probably about 320kbits/sec , Flac about 1000kbits/sec and WAV about 1.5Mbits/sec (I think). So if you are using wireless and do not have a strong signal WAV will probably not work. Whereas an MP3 stream not only has low bandwidth but also if there are gaps, it is more likely to be able to continue without a break as the SB buffer will hold more "audio seconds". The problem with Flac points to a potential issue which may affect other streams but if it works at the moment, leave well alone. It is perfectly reasonable to use MP3 on AlienBBC as long as your CPU does not get overloaded. Some may argue that you are losing signal quality but the BBC streams are already compressed and slow speed (48kb/s) so audio quality is already compromised. Disabling the RTSP entries *only affects RealAudio* and since very few audio files are encoded in RealAudio - the rest of your collection or internet streams are not affected. -- bpa ------------------------------------------------------------------------ bpa's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=1806 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=40949 _______________________________________________ plugins mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/plugins
