Cannot open mms/rstp streams in Mplayer

[Marko Vojinovic]

On Monday 16 April 2007 15:27, Dotan Cohen wrote:
> I need to view video streams (via MMS) in FC6. Unfortunatly, I cannot
> provide a url for testing as the stream must be accessed by an IP
> within the my university. No other checks are made: no UA sniffing.
> Note that the streams ARE playable in VMWare virtual machines running
> MS Windows XP.
>
> This is the output of Mplayer:
> [dotancohen at localhost ~]$ mplayer
> mms://video9.technion.ac.il/Courses/Solid-Mech1/Solid%20Mechanics%201%20-01
>.wmv MPlayer 1.0rc1-4.1.1 (C) 2000-2006 MPlayer Team
> CPU: Intel(R) Core(TM)2 CPU         T7200  @ 2.00GHz (Family: 6,
[snip]
>.wmv Resolving video9.technion.ac.il for AF_INET6...
> Couldn't resolve name for AF_INET6: video9.technion.ac.il

This part does not matter, since the dns server probably does not have IPv6 
implemented.

> Resolving video9.technion.ac.il for AF_INET...
> Connecting to server video9.technion.ac.il[132.68.1.27]: 1755...

Dns resolution was successful, server is identified as 132.68.1.27. If you do 
not want to wait for dns resolution, you might want to invoke mplayer as

$ mplayer mms://132.68.1.27/Courses/Solid-Mech1/etc...

> connection timeout

Ok, this is wrong. Mplayer found the server, but failed to connect to it on 
port 1755.

> Connecting to server video9.technion.ac.il[132.68.1.27]: 80...

Then it tries to connect on port 80. I guess that also fails.

> It seems as though it cannot find the server,

As said, it found the server, but could not establish a connection.

> however Windows Media 
> Player 11 in VMWare loads and displays that video just fine. There is
> no AU sniffing at the server. What might prevent mplayer from
> connecting? I have SELinux set to permisive, if that's important. I
> did select to have a firewall when installing FC6, how would I check
> if that's the problem? I actually don't think that the firewall is the
> problem as VMWare machine DO connect fine.

Well, I am not sure, but would bet on the firewall. If VMWare has a bridged 
nic, it just *might* be able to go around the firewall (though I somehow 
doubt that). I am not sure as to how vmware bridge-kernel-modules work.

Anyway, you should check (a) if mplayer can play wmv files (download the file 
from the server and play it locally, for example), and (b) your firewall 
settings. You can get a list of open ports on your machine by running

$ nmap localhost

or running nmap <your.ip.address> from another machine. Also, you could 
run

# iptables -L -n

to see actual firewall rules that apply (if you know how to read them). On the 
side note, if you really need to run firewall on your machine, firestarter is 
a nice gui that helps you manage firewall rules without the hassle of 
iptables syntax. It can come handy is situations like this, also because it 
has a realtime preview of all connections coming in and out of your machine, 
so you can easily pinpoint the mplayer communication and the reason for it to 
fail.

HTH, :-)
Marko

--
Marko Vojinovic
Institute of Physics
University of Belgrade
======================
e-mail: vmarko at phy.bg.ac.yu