How to play ASX using Mplayer

Posted March 9th, 2007 by sugree

ASX is usually referred to a kind of media streaming service based on Microsoft protocol. It is not the standard format recognized in Linux environment. However, it is possible to play ASX on Linux using Mplayer with a simple trick.

Actually, ASX is just a plain text containing the real URL pointed to the streaming service. For example, 95.5 Virgin HitZ has a streaming URL for webcam. In wc95_5.asx, it has a static content as follows.

 version = "3.0">
  >
     href = "mms://203.121.145.89/wc_Hitz"/>
  >95.5 Virgin Hitz>
  >Virgin Radio Thailand>
  >>
  >>
  >
  >95.5 Virgin Hitz>
  >Virgin Radio Thailand>
  >>
  >>
   href = ""/>

Honestly, its format is not well-form XML. Anyway, the essential part of this file is just what you see in ref element. In this case, it is . If you try to play this ASX directly from Mplayer, you will get error message like below.

$ mplayer http://www.virginradiothailand.com/@WebCam/hitzWC/wc95_5.asx
MPlayer dev-SVN-r22191-4.1.2 (C) 2000-2007 MPlayer Team
CPU: Intel(R) Pentium(R) M processor 1.73GHz (Family: 6, Model: 13, Stepping: 8)
CPUflags:  MMX: 1 MMX2: 1 3DNow: 0 3DNow2: 0 SSE: 1 SSE2: 1
Compiled with runtime CPU detection.
107 audio & 227 video codecs
Can't open joystick device /dev/input/js0: No such file or directory
Can't init input joystick
mplayer: could not connect to socket
mplayer: No such file or directory
Failed to open LIRC support. You will not be able to use your remote control.
 
Playing http://www.virginradiothailand.com/@WebCam/hitzWC/wc95_5.asx.
Resolving www.virginradiothailand.com for AF_INET6...
Couldn't resolve name for AF_INET6: www.virginradiothailand.com
Resolving www.virginradiothailand.com for AF_INET...
Connecting to server www.virginradiothailand.com[203.121.145.211]: 80...
Cache size set to 320 KBytes
Cache fill:  0.11% (375 bytes)   
Win32 LoadLibrary failed to load: avisynth.dll, /usr/lib/win32/avisynth.dll, /usr/local/lib/win32/avisynth.dll
 
 
Exiting... (End of file)

That's because ASX is not recognized by Mplayer as expect. However, it works if you specify mms:// instead as follow.

mplayer mms://203.121.145.89/wc_Hitz

For another example, let's try Eazy FM105.5. wc105_5.asx contains below data.

 version = "3.0">
  >
     href = "mms://203.121.145.89/wc_Eazy"/>
  >Eazy FM105.5>
  >Virgin Radio Thailand>
  >>
  >>
  >
  >Eazy FM105.5>
  >Virgin Radio Thailand>
  >>
  >>
   href = ""/>