Playing CBC Radio Streams with VLC Media Player on Linux

I have found you can get CBC radio streams from:

http://www.cbc.ca/listen/streams.html

to play with latest Linux VLC 0.9.X version by clicking on the link and letting VLC error out and then copying the link and changing three characters in it and pasting it back into VLC using the pull down menu item Media, Open Network, and pasting it into the address box and change the uppercase REF to ref then clicking play.

—- quote of error that will popup in VLC ———————

Your input can’t be opened:
VLC is unable to open the MRL ‘mms://a808.l961736807.c9617.g.lm.akamaistream.net/D/808/9617/v0001/REFlector:36807′. Check the log for details.
Your input can’t be opened:
VLC is unable to open the MRL ‘mms://a809.l961736808.c9617.g.lm.akamaistream.net/D/809/9617/v0001/REFlector:36808′. Check the log for details.
—- end of quote ——————————————————–

For example to play the above you would copy and paste the following link from the error above into VLC and change the REF to ref as shown to get it to play:

mms://a809.l961736808.c9617.g.lm.akamaistream.net/D/809/9617/v0001/reflector:36808

I have sent a message to CBC about this – hopefully they will fix this so you don’t have to do this to listen to their live streams but in the meantime this will work if you want to listen to any of the links from this page.

Update: December 15 2008 – still no reply from CBC or change at the CBC site but I think the same limitation applies to Mplayer and Kmplayer – these players also will not start the links when you click on them from the CBC pages but if you paste in the link I mention above with the lower case ref then the player will play the stream.  The problem is they don’t go as far as VLC and actually give you the final link that plays the stream so you cannot copy and paste the link as described above.