Hi everyone,

I don't know if this is the right place for application problems, especially since this one is not strictly speaking even on Mongo, but I think the problem is probably common to mplayer running on any Jornada 720 so I'll ask for help here because the solution will be helpful to readers here (unless I'm advised of a better place for my query).

I want to listen to streaming wmv radio on my Jornada 720, because I was unable to get mplayer installed on my Jornada 680 to try listening to it there (that's a whole other topic - even using the opkg-prepare script, mplayer failed to install on the 680, though I plan to revisit that at a later date).

Because JLime's 2.6 kernels don't yet support sound, I used wicked74's j7xx-rootfs-2.4kernel-05-01-08.tar.bz2 kernel with his 7xx-gpe-06.tar.bz2 (with 720.b0x.com's gpe desktop) userland (all from http://jlime.com/downloads/releases/other/700/).

mplayer ran smoothly on my Jornada 720 with that build, and streaming mp3 radio sounded great from the speaker.

But when I tried streaming wmv radio, mplayer again ran smoothly on my Jornada 720 with that build, but all I got from the speaker was an unintelligible scratchy garble.

I know the Jornada 720 has a rather limited speaker which might cause this problem, so I reconfigured mplayer and reduced the bandwidth from 44khz to 8khz, but this made no difference.
The input bitrate of the wmv stream was 96kbs, but I couldn't find a way to configure mplayer to reduce the output bitrate to see if that helped.

I then tried streaming real audio radio, and again mplayer ran smoothly on my Jornada 720 with that same build, but this time all I got was silence from the speaker.

So I'd be very grateful for any help with solving this problem - it'd be a real win for JLime getting streaming wmv radio working, since it was one of the things Jornadas couldn't do with Win CE although many owners wanted it (maybe there was a successful hack, but I never verified that).

Thanks!

Hi again,

Have been poking about on the web, and think I have identified an application which might solve my problem above:- ffplay

It seems like this is a shell for ffmpeg which does allow the reduction of an input audio stream's bitrate to a smaller output bitrate.

So I'm hoping this might resolve the issue of the Jornada 720's speaker being unable to deal with a high bitrate audio stream, if that is indeed what my problem is.
Of course it may not be the Jornada's speaker, but its soundchip which can't cope. Either way, I suspect the solution might be the same; reduce the audio stream's output bitrate.

So am going to post this idea as a request topic on JLime forum's Application Porting thread.

I'd be delighted to hear from anyone with any ideas about this!

Considering the fact that Jlime Mongo for the 720 series hasn't had an audio driver (Alsa) for ages it might be handy to work on said sound problem before going to all this trouble of porting a multimedia player...

Really, we've all been waiting for sound such a long long lo.o.o.o.o.o.o.o.ong time but nobody seems to be able to port a driver to Jlime Mongo. If you finally succeed in getting ffplay to work in GPE then it might be a bit of a disappointment when you realize that there's still no audio driver...

Thanks for your reply Meneer.

Actually I have got sound working in wicked74's 7xx-gpe-06.tar.bz2 GPE userland, in combination with wicked74's j7xx-rootfs-2.4kernel-05-01-08.tar.bz2 kernel, which is why I'm hoping for a port of ffplay.

I may well be wrong, but I believe it's the 2.6 kernel which doesn't have sound, not the Mongo userland.

2.4 kernels, such as wicked74's j7xx-rootfs-2.4kernel-05-01-08.tar.bz2 kernel, do have sound.

I plan to try out that same kernel with Mongo userland at some point, to see if they work together, since wicked74's icewm userland for that kernel is quite big (430mb uncompressed), and I don't have big CF cards.

So that's why I'm looking for ffplay to be ported over both to wicked74's 7xx-gpe-06.tar.bz2 GPE userland, as well as to the latest Mongo userland. Because mplayer already works fine playing mp3 audio streams on Jornada 720s.

And I'd like to use ffplay to add wma (and maybe .ra?) audio streams to my success so far with mp3 audio streams.

Okay. I understand. Do all other things work w/ the 2.4 kernel? By the way, I think some pretty basic things changed in the way a 2.6 kernel works w/ kernel modules etcetera. So I hope the Mongo userland works w/ a 2.4 kernel.

Good luck!

Got exams out of the way now, so looking at sounddriver again. The 2.4 one is a mess since it users alot of smaller drivers to communicate which are all removed in 2.6. But getting there.

Tank you very much in advance! There are two holy Grails remaining for Jlme Mongo I think:
1. Sound.
2. A super powersave function like in WinCE.

Batteries drain very fast on me...

Any news yet on sound and power management?

I'm also interested in this, getting the two points above functioning would be a huge step towards more daily usage(at least for me).