Monday, July 19, 2004

Real Audio on a homepod

Picked up a HomePod at JavaOne a few weeks back, but I am only now finding the time to play with it. One of the things I want to do with it is to be able to listen to Real audio streams, but this is not supported in the current version of the firmware. I have a longer term goal of writing a codec for the HomePod for this format, but just now I don't have the time to delve into it so I needed a workaround.

I tried various things with some open-source audio players such as xmms and MPlayer before finally hitting on something that works, albeit in a roundabout way. I have pointed winamp at the Real audio stream and at the same time I have installed a shoutcast server and the shoutcast broadcast plugin for winamp. Winamp then redirects the Real audio stream to my shoutcast server which then makes it available on my home network as streaming mp3 - a format supported by the HomePod. Not the most elegant solution, but it works. If anyone has other ideas I'm open to suggestions.

For more details, see my home page.