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Streaming audio (MP3)...Works with IE, whats the problem with Netscape??

O

overturfa

Member
So I'm coding this webpage for my band and I'm trying to write as much as possible in straight HTML and/or PHP to make it digestable by most popular browsers without needing a bunch of plugins. In our tracks section I've been playing around with different options to stream our music. Right now I have action buttons that call an .m3u file when clicked, which then references the actual mp3 file for streaming audio.

This is a beautiful thing under IE, but from what I can tell, Netscape/Firefox-Derivatives are actually downloading the .m3u file to disk and then attempting to launch the file locally. The result is that Media Player opens and gives the 'cannot locate file' error because instead of looking on my web server for the mp3 file, the dowloaded m3u file is essentially telling Media Player to look for the mp3 in a sub-directory of Netscape's download folder (which of course doesn't exist).

So... clearly Netscape/Firefox has a problem with the way it handles .m3u files. That said, I'm left with basically two options.

1) Figure out a way to tell Netscape how handle .m3u files and pass that information on to every user who visits the site with Netscape or Firefox (not practical for my site visitors).

or

2) Figure out a better way to stream my mp3s in a way that a. Netscape/Firefox likes; b. Still protects my content from "Right-click/Save-as"; and c. Still works with IE. (Sounds like a winner to me).

Suggestions???

p.s. I'd like to stay away from coding Flash since I don't know much about it and I want to stay with .mp3 because it's a pretty universal format.

Here is the website -- Click on 'tracks' to see the page in question.

Here is my code for the page in question

 
Well, using an M3U doesn't really protect your content. Even if the M3U opens properly in WMP, I can still right-click the track in the track list, find its URL and download the MP3 directly.

There are several options for streaming media that allow you to protect your content from being saved. Shoutcast servers and Windows Media Servers are two popular options. Who is your web hosting company?
 
Currently I'm hosting with goDaddy.

You're right though, and I understand that anyone with basic HTML knowledge can easily defeat an m3u. I guess I'm not all that worried about it because our stuff is copyrighted anyway and we're not selling anything as of yet.

My main focus is the ability to stream though, and if you know of a way I can stream to both IE and and Netscape/FF all the while protecting my content at the same time, that would be ideal.

 
MeChad, thank you for taking time to help me out. I did actually figure out my problem after a little bit of research.

I was using a relative path to my mp3 file in the m3u file. IE was clever enought to interpret this, but Netscape, et.al., tripped on this.

My solution:
I re-coded the m3u's with the full path to the mp3 file beginning with http://www.blahblah.com/etc/etc/... and that seems to work under IE and Netscape 8.0.

For now I'm happy with that seeing as how I don't own the server my site sits on which makes installing server-side software difficult to say the least. Also, I'm not real worried about piracy either. Everything we post up is copyrighted and we can prove it.

I might look into something more robust later on, but I do appreciate your time.

Thanks again,
Adam..
 
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