The doumentation is built in the program:
- Press the help toolbar button for command line and general documentation (a screen shot of the help screen appears in sourceforge as well)
- Hover over any text label for a tool tip explaining the corresponding functionality
Since I am mostly familiar with MPlayer, I will explain why it is needed in MPlayer's case:
- MPlayer will close once it reached the end of the stream, whereas you might want to continue recording (for example you want to record a 3 hour internet radio show)
- Even if you write a script that keeps restarting it (which is not trivial to do correctly), you will need to stamp the files it creates (so they are different), and in the end join them
- Many times corrupt files are produced, especially WMA and MP3 VBR headers (maybe because you have to kill the process in order to end the recording) - which is why post processing is needed
- You can't schedule MPlayer to stop after a prescribed time (the same radio show example applies here)
- Many users who are not computer savvy will have much easier time with a GUI rather than command line (though you would still need command line for scheduling and automation)
I am less familiar with VLC's behavior with regards to streams, but one thing I'm pretty sure about is that it doesn't have inherent scheduling capabilities, and to achieve that you'd have to use VLM via telnet or some such - too complicated for most users
In addition, SR.NET gives you tray minimization (with status balloons), easy defaults and presets (for both programs and command line arguments), keeps a history of last recorded streams, logs all its output to file, etc
03-24-2010, 08:04 PM
Linear Mode
