Hi all,
here´s a curious problem I encountered lately:
I was adding a personalized group to the programm list of freetuxtv
.
I added the path/file: /home/rosika/eigene_Programme.m3u
which holds
the address of “BBC News TV”: http://ott-cdn.ucom.am/s24/index.m3u8.
But freetuxtv
says:
“Your input can’t be opened: VLC is unable to open the MRL ‘http://ott-cdn.ucom.am/s24/index.m3u8’.”
Well, I know freetuxtv
uses vlc
under the hood, so I tried playing the URL http://ott-cdn.ucom.am/s24/index.m3u8 directly in vlc
.
Again it failed.
However: mpv
is perfectly able of playing this URL. I can see the live stream of the BBC programme.
I was asking myself: Why can´t vlc
do it then?
I did a little research on that.
Since mpv
can play the stream but vlc
(and by extension, freetuxtv
) cannot, the problem likely lies in one of the following areas:
vlc
Lacks the necessary codecs or modules (1)- network or HTTPS handling issues (2)
- force
vlc
to use ffmpeg Instead of Its own demuxers (3)
Well, it´s not (1), it seems.
(2) and (3) I may rule out as well.
I tried addressing a potential (2) problem thus:
vlc --no-http-reconnect http://ott-cdn.ucom.am/s24/index.m3u8
…
… and for (3) I tried
vlc --demux ffmpeg http://ott-cdn.ucom.am/s24/index.m3u8
.
Neither of them worked. The problem seems to be lying somewhere else.
The error messages pointed in the direction of rights management:
VLC media player 3.0.16 Vetinari (revision 3.0.13-8-g41878ff4f2)
[0000560e17825580] main libvlc: Running vlc with the default interface. Use 'cvlc' to use vlc without interface.
[00007f0600001610] access stream error: HTTP 403 error
[00007f0600001610] http stream error: error: HTTP/1.1 403 Forbidden
qt.qpa.xcb: QXcbConnection: XCB error: 3 (BadWindow), sequence: 960, resource id: 20578458, major code: 40 (TranslateCoords), minor code: 0
QObject::~QObject: Timers cannot be stopped from another thread.
This seems to indicate that vlc
is being blocked from accessing the stream, while mpv
is not. This usually happens when:
- the server is rejecting
vlc
’s user agent - the server expects specific headers (e.g., a referrer or cookie)
Spoofing vlc
´s user agent didn´t work either:
vlc --http-user-agent="Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; mpv)" http://ott-cdn.ucom.am/s24/index.m3u8
Since the “403 Forbidden” error persists, it looks like the server is blocking vlc
entirely,
possibly based on additional headers like referrer or cookies that mpv
sends automatically but vlc
does not.
Seems to be a futile attempt all in all, as even if I succeeded in playing the BBC stream in vlc
by using some workaround I´d not be able to run it successfully in freetuxtv
.
I mean freetuxtv
relies on vlc
and I guess it thereby uses its default settings,
which would still pose a problem.
So if I cannot integrate the BBC URL in freetuxtv
I´m perfectly O.K. with playing the stream in mpv
.
I was just wondering why vlc
wouldn´t play it using its default settings. I guess there´s not much I can do about it in that respect.
Does perhaps anyone else have any ideas
Thanks and many greetings from Rosika.