Anyway, about half my collection is in FLAC. Even if the endpoint did support FLAC playback, it would be too large to be practical for all-day-streaming. Since I didn’t want to go to the bother of reencoding my entire collection just so I could stream it over the internet, I sat down this weekend and started hacking transcoding support into mediastreamer.

The tag reading library used by mediastreamer already supported FLAC, so adding FLAC files to the database was as simple as updating the glob that searched for files. My approach to transcoding was to use commandline tools to decode and reencode the file in question, and then pipe that into the webserver for streaming. It turns out that everyone’s implementation is broken in some way unless I specify a Content-length header. As far as Flash is concerned, files hosted without a Content-length never end, meaning the playlist never advances. Chrome’s native <audio> support for mp3 simply rejects files are served without Content-length. Firefox and Opera don’t matter, because they don’t even support mp3 natively.

There’s two ways I can think of to know the file-size, so that I can set the Content-length header in HTTP:

1. Transcode the entire file before streaming, and just look
2. Use a deterministic method of encoding, so that the size of the output file can be estimated by looking at the length of the input file

I tried method 1, but I was not satisfied with the several second pauses between files. Since I plan on deploying this solution to a computer much slower than my development machine, the pauses between files would be even longer, and unacceptable.

Method 2 is currently in development. Deterministic output means that VBR is right out, so I’m stuck with encoding to CBR mp3. I’m estimating the Content-length by multiplying the length of the song in milliseconds by (bitrate / 1000). This is close enough, but somehow results in a length several kbytes longer than the output from lame. Interestingly, this doesn’t seem to affect Flash; the Content-length doesn’t need to be right, it just needs to be close. How frustrating. Still, it would be nice to know how to accurately predict the output of lame. It’s unsettling to be setting incorrect Content-lengths.

I’m going to look into submitting bug reports to webkit for their poor <audio> support. Or maybe not. It’s possible that Sinatra is just incorrectly responding to Range requests, which webkit seems to like – but range is probably a dangerous proposition for a file that’s being dynamically generated, so I’m not entirely sure whose fault it is. No other browsers use Range when they make requests for their <audio> tags, as far as I can tell. Unfortunately, I’ll probably have to build a webserver that hosts both vorbis and mp3, without Content-length headers, to test this across a wide range of browsers.

Browse Source

Another bugfix release. Looks like I forgot to set ConceptRoll for turrets (because apparently you want to roll vehicles). Not being able to move turrets left and right should be fixed. If your config files are in a non-working state, simply open the program and hit save for a fix.

Download

Browse Source

Alpha 2 is out already, with fixes:

• Completely forgot to modify relevant parts of GameSettings.ini in Alpha 1, now fixed
• Program now exits gracefully when BFBC2 directory not found, instead of crashing
• Warning message actually says what it should

Download Alpha 1

Browse Source

This is the first release of the BFBC2ConfigTool. I’ve hacked up a quick alpha version that should painlessly deactivate mouse smoothing, and allow people to fiddle with their sensitivities. There’s also an option to make the Russians in BFBC2 speak in English, since apparently some people were encountering problems with that.

This initial alpha release is targeted mainly at reddit users. If all goes well, I’ll post about this on the EA forums.

This is alpha software. It will probably break. Use at your own risk. There is currently no input validation. I take responsibility for nothing. Please report bugs so I can fix them.

To use, simply run the provided exe. You need .NET 2.0.

Here’s a couple examples:

http://fitzsimmons.ca/bfbc2/2503473115,3fc5640a-7dbb-415f-9e45-ba6cec0562dc,A Bacon Server

http://fitzsimmons.ca/bfbc2/bfbc2://3363010643,b652b484-4188-42ea-8885-50fc4991af5b,Reddit%20Unofficial%20Gaming%20Community-%20Chicago

This should allow you to link from places that only allow http style URIs. If this takes off at all, I’ll write a some info about what’s happening on the redirect page, for people that don’t have the handler set up.

Browse source

I’ve released the next alpha of BFBC2 to address issues with alpha4. Exception handler code has been added which should me debug tripwire’s problem. The regex has been updated to include server names with !s in them.

Browse source

It turns out that creating UIs in Visual Studio is really easy. I created one for BFBC2FavouriteManager, so it now actually lives up to its name; it can now manage your favourites. Here’s a screenshot:

The only thing missing now is that I’d like to add some signalling to the program so that the manager knows to reload the list when the link handler adds a new server. The link handler operates as a separate process, so I’m going to need IPC of some kind to achieve that.

Outside of that, I can’t think of any other features to add. I’m open to suggestions.

browse source

It’s painfully difficult to add custom servers to Battlefield Bad Company 2. There’s no support for directly connecting via IP, and the server browser has a tendency to fail. Fortunately, the server strings for favourites and history are saved in a easily-parsed plaintext ini file, so it’s possible to hack in new servers to your favourites.

I’ve written this program to help make that process a little easier. It registers the bfbc2:// URI protocol, and when you click on a properly formatted link, it’ll automatically add that server to your favourites. Hopefully this will make sharing servers a bit easier on everyone.

The current release is alpha! Use at your own risk! It has nothing fancy like installers or icons! Read the readme in the archive for more information. I’m sure even this minimal program has a handful of bugs. Let me know what they are so I can fix them. I expect to see my regex reject a few server strings that are actually legit.

.NET 2.0 is a minimum requirement. If you don’t have that, you might as well get .NET 3.5 SP1 while you’re at it.

Anyway, here’s some sample links:

Reddit Unofficial Gaming Community- Chicago
–o Narwhal o– Ranked Rush 24/7
Hals n’ Pals – Mature Gaming Community

I think the alpha is complete. Next on the list is to run some preliminary testing. Once that is done, I’ll make a source and binary release to the community.

Reddit Unofficial Gaming Community

The next step is input validation. Here’s a sample server string: 3363010643,b652b484-4188-42ea-8885-50fc4991af5b,Reddit Unofficial Gaming Community – Chicago;

As far as I can tell, the format for the server string is three fields separated by commas:

1. Some sort of numeric ID
2. Something that’s probably a GUID, looks like it’s in hexidecimal. All servers appear to be in the 8-4-4-4-12 configuration.
3. A freeform string

My current goal is to write a regular expression to match this format, and validate incoming input with it. It’s not a particularly challenging goal, but it will take time and will undoubtedly be a fairly ugly “write-only” regexp that nobody (including my future self) will understand.

After input is validated, I simply need to parse the ini file, check that the input is not already in the user’s list, and insert the new server. Not unreasonable to think I’d be done the basic functionality of this program by the end of the week.