Problems with HTTP audio type detection with mov files

[pgunn@…]

I've been trying to play with audiofiles on the speech accent archive
​http://accent.gmu.edu/browse_maps/namerica.php

and have had audio stutter with all files. My browser is using mplayer to play the files through a wrapper, and I found that the stutter is present without that wrapper - doing
"mplayer ​http://accent.gmu.edu/soundtracks/japanese7.mov" invokes the stutter reliably. (this happens regardless of cache settings - I have tried variants on that cmdline that request full precaching of the file). Retrieving the file with wget gives me a file that plays normally.

I have eliminated the possibility of it being a network lag issue by copying it to the webserver running on my laptop - I get the same stutter with localhost URLs.

Using the -v flag to mplayer suggests that the following is at fault - playing with the URL gives me:

[mov] Audio stream found, -aid 0
Audio bits: 16 chans: 1 rate: 22050
Fourcc: ima4

playing with the file gives me instead:
[lavf] Audio stream found, -aid 0

I additionally note that with the copy I have on my laptop's webserver, if I make another copy with the extension of .mpg and play that through the localhost url, it plays fine.

I suspect that mplayer, when using an URL-stream, does not do the same format detection that it does with files on disk, and this is the cause of the difficulties.

My mplayer version is:
anxiety:~$ mplayer -v | head -2
MPlayer SVN-r28461-4.3.2 (C) 2000-2009 MPlayer Team
CPU: Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Duo CPU P8600 @ 2.40GHz (Family: 6, Model: 23, Stepping: 6)

[reimar]

Actually it plays fine with -demuxer lavf and it doesn't play right from disk with -demuxer mov.
-demuxer lavf is supposed to be the default, but part of MPlayer was forgotten in the update, fixed in r29181.
As a workaround, you can add demuxer=lavf to your config file.