While vlc is a very slick piece of work, I generally prefer to use mplayer and a gui front end for playing streams and media files, it behaves the same way under XP and linux, will play whatever I throw it, ignores embedded script commands and unless told does not go talking to strange people on stranger networks.
Enough testimonal, its time to save a stream of the days session of the Legislature in XP (and mind the line wraps), fire off a couple of consoles (click on command prompt in the start menu) type once only in one of the consoles either of the following lines:
mplayer -dumpfile house.dump -dumpstream mms://alisonhseav.legislature.state.al.us/HSEAUDIO
mplayer mms://alisonsenav.legislature.state.al.us/SENAUDIO -dumpfile senate.dump -dumpstream
When the stream ends, mplayer will exit and the you find (using last thursday’s data) one file of about 28 megs for the house and the other of 33 megs for the Senate.
These are wma files and are not as universally playable as say mp3. They also contain prolonged periods of silence while the chamber is in recess.
So, first lets dump the files to wav format (warning this takes a lot of room)
mplayer -quiet -vo null -vc null -ao pcm:waveheader:file=Senate.wav Senate.dump
Then use sox to trim the silent parts out and convert to mp3.
sox -V -S senate.wav -c 1 senate.mp3 silence -l 1 00:00:00.5 -45d -1 00:01:00 -45d
The Senate audio stream is in stereo while the House stream is mono for some reason. So add the -c 1 (mono) option to make mono mp3.
After feeding the dog, harrassing the cat and children, you will find a mp3 thats about 58 megs (if left in stereo) or 29 megs in mono, which is bit smaller than the 1 gig+ wav file produced earlier and close to the size (and at same bitrate) as original wma.
From this earlier post, you can extract the framework of a batch file to do all this for you.
