mplayer fails to play some wavs

[yuri@…]

Here is an example:
​http://my.fit.edu/~vkepuska/ece5526/HTK/TIMIT_Corpus/TIMIT/TEST/DR4/FJMG0/SX191.WAV

mplayer says:
Playing SX191.WAV.

Exiting... (End of file)

Versions that I tried:
dev-SVN-r25932-4.2.1
1.0rc2-4.2.1 (=mplayer-0.99.11_12 FreeBSD port)

[compn]

what programs can play this?

seems to have metadata at the beginning of the file.

[yuri@…]

sweep can play it.
play program installed by sox-14.2.0 plays it too.

Many programs assume WAV format to be more simple than it actually is.
They assume that DATA immediately follows headers when there can be various other sections in between.
Maybe mplayer also doesn't parse such WAVs correctly for that reason.

[compn]

this appears to be a nist-sphere file
​http://ftp.cwi.nl/audio/NIST-SPHERE

so its a modified wav file, without a wave header.
probably wont get supported with mplayer demuxer (patches welcome)
possibly will be supported in ffmpeg in the future.

[yuri@…]

Looking closely, I see that there is no WAVE header.
But what bugs me is that 'sweep' can parse it ok.
Sweep uses libsndfile.so.1.
Should mplayer just use libsndfile instead since there are probably many such weakly documented features implemented there?

[compn]

mplayer isnt good at using external libs for playback.
a patch to make mplayer use libsndfile is welcome.

[compn]

it should play if you figure out the correct rawaudio options:
mplayer SX191.WAV -rawaudio format=0x1 -demuxer rawaudio