Kivy Audio: ffpyplayer error does not throw exception

[JC]

Hi,

I am testing a simple implementation of Kivy Audio and came across the following:

When ffpyplayer has an error (see debug log snippet below) it does not get caught by try/except and ends up crashing Kivy (I am testing using the kivy launcher).

As it doesn't throw an exception, I can't test for it and handle it in the code. See log extract below and code snippet.

Is this a bug? 

Is there a more robust/reliable way to implement an audio player where source is an URL? (Playing sound from URL seems to have other issues for me: "pause/play" works fine for me from a file but if the source is URL it acts up e.g. it resumes play and then restarts again from the start)

From kivy debug log:

[WARNING] [ffpyplayer  ] [https @ 0000020bebfeb9c0] HTTP error 403 Forbidden
[ERROR  ] [ffpyplayer  ] https://www.buzzsprout.com/1984146/14368896-january-24-2024.mp3: Server returned 403 Forbidden (access denied)

Code snippet:
sound = SoundLoader.load("https://www.buzzsprout.com/1984146/14368896-january-24-2024.mp3")
if sound:
    try:
        sound.play()
    except Exception as e:
        print(e)

[elli...@cox.net]

I would recommend using UrlRequest to download the audio file https://kivy.org/doc/stable/api-kivy.network.urlrequest.html#module-kivy.network.urlrequest, use the SoundLoader to play it. 

---

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Sent: Wednesday, January 24, 2024 1:39 PM
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Subject: [kivy-users] Kivy Audio: ffpyplayer error does not throw exception

 

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[JC]

Thanks. Downloading it first would add quite a bit of delay for my intended use-case (the "button" that triggers the code is a "Play" button so the user will expect something in good time). As these are links to podcast audio files they can be comparatively big. I actually provide a separate download option too.

I didn't find much re. 403 error with ffpyplayer but there's quite a few hits on this for ffmpeg, which I imagine are caused by similar things? The link that causes the problem for me does a redirect and the actual mp3 filename is quite different from what it is in the original URL. I guess Buzzsprout does this to counter scraping?

Had a look at the Kivy source code and there's no handling for the situation where ffpyplayer throws an error (see line 119, kivy/kivy/core/audio/audio_ffpyplayer.py at master · kivy/kivy · GitHub). 

Here's what you get when using that snippet of code for ffpyplayer directly in python terminal:

>>> from ffpyplayer.player import MediaPlayer
>>> ffplayer = MediaPlayer("https://www.buzzsprout.com/1984146/14368896-january-24-2024.mp3")                        
>>> [https @ 000002168f74fd40] HTTP error 403 Forbidden

https://www.buzzsprout.com/1984146/14368896-january-24-2024.mp3: Server returned 403 Forbidden (access denied)

[elli...@cox.net]

It appears that the SoundLoader was not architected with a URL in mind.  This looks like a bug (or a worthy feature request) to me.  I suggest reporting it on the kivy github.

You could try using the ffpyplayer directly, here are the docs: https://matham.github.io/ffpyplayer/player.html#ffpyplayer.player.MediaPlayer

Or make the changes to the source and issue a PR.

As a quick fix you could look at checking the file is reachable on the network prior to using the SoundLoader. 

---

From: kivy-...@googlegroups.com <kivy-...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of JC <kiv...@gmail.com>

Sent: Thursday, January 25, 2024 6:03 AM

To: Kivy users support <kivy-...@googlegroups.com>

Subject: Re: [kivy-users] Kivy Audio: ffpyplayer error does not throw exception

 

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/kivy-users/6eca46a6-34d4-4dd0-9b54-e53f2f0bc09bn%40googlegroups.com.

[JC]

Thanks for the help -- agreed. Reported on github. (My first!)

[JC]

Just in case anyone with similar problem might find it useful:

The issue with pause/play causing the audio to resume and then start again from scratch can be worked around by calling the seek() via Clock.schedule_once() after you call play(). The reason is that in the Kivy code the play() method for ffpyplayer in audio_ffpyplayer.py ends with a dispatch event followed by a seek(0). I think timing issues are causing this seek(0) to be called *after* you do seek(position) in your own code.

I added this also to the issue I opened:  `kivy.core.audio` - SoundLoader: support URLs as source, error handling and timeout · Issue #8591 · kivy/kivy (github.com)