Official moOde 6.5.1 support thread

[TheOldPresbyope]

@duracell80
@Tim Curtis

I'm not sure where this discussion of podcasts is going.

I thought the original post http://moodeaudio.org/forum/showthread.p...2#pid19422 was concerned with the seekbar wonkiness in v6.5.1 which has been discussed elsewhere and is being resolved.

The podcast illustrated in the image in that post is indeed a file with a title and a duration of 36-odd minutes (e.g., 2212 sec) as the #EXTINF line in the .m3u file declared. It's the seekbar wonkiness which makes it look strange in the image.  

As previously noted, these MP3 podcasts are not streams of an infinite number of MP3 frames ala a radio station but rather what some call "MP3-on-demand" in which the server is "streaming" the finite number of MP3 frames from an MP3 file rather than offering the MP3 file for download.

As for the apparent 0 time duration of a true MP3 stream, see the MPD plugin which parses .m3u files. From src/playlist/plugins/EXTM3uPlaylistPlugin.cxx, this snippet shows MPD forces any negative value to zero before anything else sees it.

Code:

/**
* Parse a EXTINF line.
*
* @param line the rest of the input line after the colon
*/
static Tag
extm3u_parse_tag(const char *line)
{
    long duration;
    char *endptr;
    const char *name;

    duration = strtol(line, &endptr, 10);
    if (endptr[0] != ',')
        /* malformed line */
        return Tag();

    if (duration < 0)
        /* 0 means unknown duration */
        duration = 0;

In any case, M3U has no formal specification and the use of -1 to indicate a stream seems to be a convention. In example 1 of the Wikipedia article on M3U is found

A length of -1 or 0 may be used when the media file is a streaming file, as there is no actual, predefined length value.

Just my 2-cents worth.

Regards,
Kent