Thanks for responding to my email

[Gavin McCullagh]

On Mon, 05 Nov 2007, Charlie Dorff wrote:

> Thank you for responding to my email. The 2 radio stations I listen to are the 
> bbc (www.bbcworldservice.com) and Minnesota Public Radio (www.mpr.org). I
> use Rhythmbox media player. When I used Windows and I clicked on listen
> it was automatic. 

I'm not using a thin client, but I presume if you are that you've tested
you can play some sound through Rhythmbox.

I tried MPR.  When I clicked on the link for an mp3 feed, firefox prompted
me to open it with Rhythmbox.  Rhythmbox started but didn't seem to play
the stream.  This seems to be what happened to you.

With the MPR popup and Rhythmbox visible on screen, I selected the "Radio"
on the left side of the Rhythmbox screen and then dragged the mp3 link from
the MPR popup window into the stations list in Rhythmbox.  This created an
entry for MPR and when I double clicked on it, it started to play.

Alternatively, if you choose "open with: other" and type in /usr/bin/totem
instead of Rhythmbox, totem plays it stright off.

-- Use{less,ful} details --

Rhythmbox is able to play the radio station, but firefox doesn't seem to be
able to directly launch it.  What's happening (I think) is firefox is
launching:
	rhythmbox http://minnesota.publicradio.org/tools/play/streams/the_current.pls

but rhythmbox doesn't seem to be able to take a playlist file on the
command line like that.  The only way I can see to get rhythmbox to read a
radio station from the command line is this:
	rhythmbox-client --enqueue http://currentstream1.publicradio.org:80/

but that involves parsing the .pls file, which firefox is unlikely to do.

I'd guess this should be reported as a bug to the Rhythmbox packagers.  It
seems to set up this mailcap entry:
	audio/x-scpls; rhythmbox '%s'; description="MP3 ShoutCast playlist"; test=test -n "$DISPLAY"; nametemplate=%s.pls

which doesn't work.  Either that mailcap entry should be pointed to totem
(known as "Movie Player" in the menus) or rhythmbox should be taught to
handle pls files from the command line.

Gavin