AlienBBC FAQ

Frequently Asked Questions

• Why are the live audio streams garbled?
  There is a bug in mplayer that causes the garbled audio on live BBC streams. A patch has been posted on the mplayer mailing list but it has not made it in to a release yet. See here for more information.
  See here: mplayer for a Windows release of a patch to mplayer that should fix this problem.

• Live stream stops after 3 hours 22 minutes 53 seconds.
  This is due to the wave header setting the length of the stream, see here for more details.
  This thread also includes a change to slimserver-convert.conf which fixes the problem. This is included in AlienBBC v1.00 or later.

• Why aren't accented characters displayed on the SqueezeBox?
  The SqueezeBox is displaying the raw html data from the BBC page and this should be translated to proper unicode before display. See here for a partial fix.

• How should I configure my firewall?
  To play streams and display data from the reference sites AlienBBC and the SlimServer need access to the internet through any firewalls. The firewall should be configured to allow the following programs access to the internet: slim.exe, mplayer.exe and socketwrapper.exe.

• Radio Station Timeout
  The default value for the radio station timeout in the SlimServer is 5 seconds. To access the BBC stations this value is often too small. To change this go to the "Server Settings / Network" page and change the value "Radio Station Timeout". A timeout of 15 seconds should be enough.

• How can I add a Radio Station to AlienBBC
  The "AlienStream" function allows you to a radio station playlist to the AlienBBC menu. Simply create a folder "AlienStream" under your normal playlist folder and then add .m3u playlists to it. These will then be available from "AlienBBC Playlists" menu item.
  
  For example, create a .m3u file containing:
     #EXTM3U
     #EXTINF:-1,Radio Suisse Romand Couleur 3
     http://real.xobix.ch/live/rsr3.ram
  
  Note: you can only put 1 stream per playlist.

• I have NOD32 installed and AlienBBC doesn't work
  To get AlienBBC to work with NOD32 installed it is necessary to add "socketwrapper.exe" to the IMON exclusion list. See these two screen shots for details: IMON1 IMON2 (thanks to fairyliquidizer for persevering with AlienBBC to find this out, see http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=20637)

• Where has station 'xyz' gone
  In the release version of AlienBBC v1.01 we have disabled some of the stations by default. Go to the AlienBBC confiuration page in the SlimServer web UI to add in your station.

• The radio station remains silent
  - Even though the plugin displayed successfully in the SlimServer and you can choose to start playing a radio station on a Squeezebox.
  - Even when using SoftSqueeze running on the SlimServer machine.
  - Even though the mplayer tests from http://www.x2systems.com/AlienBBC/installation.html work.
  - Even though you run Windows XP and did a clean install of the latest version of AlienBBC using the install pack
  - Even though these tests work perfectly:
  C:\Program Files\SlimServer\server\Bin\MSWin32-x86-multi-thread\Test mplayer.bat
  - Even though you increased the network timeout.
  
  Possible solution:
  Try Ian Cook's patched socketwrapper from
  http://homepage.eircom.net/~altondsl/slim/socketwrapper_0.12_20060220.zip

Last updated: 7 August 2006