fd in FreeBSD 5.3 fails

So I decided to include some entries for Swedish Radio in my Slimserver. The problem is that I use FreeBSD as the operating system for my slimserver and the Swedish Radio only send out radio with Windows Media or Real Audio codecs.

A solution was found called AlienBBC. It enables use of mplayer as a converter for media streams for BBC radio stations. But, there are some special tricks in FreeBSD to think of that is not mentioned on the webpages.

The problem I encountered was that mplayer wanted to communicate via the device /dev/fd/3 that did not exist on my FreeBSD box. Further I had problems on my box as mounting fdescfs on /dev/fd did not work either (FreeBSD 5.3_RELEASE). If one ktrace mount_fdescfs, one can see that it only looks for fdescfs in the /boot/modules/ directory and not /boot/kernel/ (where it is located). Manually loading the module made things work though.

kldload /boot/kernel/fdescfs.ko
mount_fdescfs fdescfs /dev/fd