Listening to the online radio with MPlayer

Install MPlayer

What if I want to listen to the online radio having got only base FreeBSD system? In this case I should only install the MPlayer package. MPlayer is a minimalist but powerful audio and video player, media encoder. It even can repair broken files.

To install it you should execute the next command.

The pkgng may ask you for the confirmation of updating itself. Don't disagree :)

After the pkg package is updated, confirm downloading and installing all packages required for MPlayer functioning.

As you can see MPlayer weights at about 60MB and requires you to download only 16MB over the network. You even needn't to find a [suspected] distributive over the Internet. And this works 'out of the box'. This is why I like UNIX.

Look! MPlayer is installed and you can now use it. But wait! You may ask "How can I use it if there is no graphics on the 'desktop'?". I'll ask: easy, MPlayer does not require video drivers and graphical X11 desktop. You can listen to the music or online radio from your terminal and do your work on the 2nd, 3rd, ..., 8th terminals. (This is the second reason I like UNIX: I have not to install tons of unnecessary software if I just want to listen to the radio.)

How yo use MPlayer

Easy (assuming you already have the a working Internet connection and integrated or discrete sound card, speakers). To listen to the radio you should use the command like this:

$ mplayer 'LOCATOR'

Where the LOCATOR is an media resource locator of the online radio stream (in simple words: URL of the stream you want to listen).

For example:

starts MPLayer and outputs the sound.

To sum up

I want to say that there is nothing impossible for modern operating systems. But FreeBSD (and many other *nix systems) really makes our life easy (compare to the heavy WMP with its horrible startup wizard). MPlayer is cool and easy to use. And you can quickly install it using the FreeBSD's pkgng manager in a seconds.