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BBC Testing Ogg Vorbis Streaming
jregel writes: "Credit must go to AirLance who posted a comment on Slashdot that the BBC are currently testing Ogg Vorbis streaming. As the comment says, users should email the BBC and show support. It would certainly suggest that someone at the BBC is quietly pushing open source. Is this the first major media outlet to use the format?" I hope someone from NPR is reading this, too :)
Ogg is a great format, I'm not sure how well it is for streaming but is sounds a hell of alot better at 128k than mp3 does. And best of all it's free, no fee's for running a server like you find with some other formats such as realaudio.
GoatPigSheep, the 3 most important food groups
Whatever happened to version 1.0?
but for personal music jukeboxes of all shapes and sizes, I wish people would use FLAC or some other lossless audio codec. As broadband and microstorage become more common maybe these will become more used.
If this goes over well, this could be the first big step in terms of OGG's popularity, and a step towards
entering the realm that formats like MP3 and RealAudio have dominated for far too long.
I opened the Radio 1 stream in XMMS, and it sounds much better than an MP3 stream at 60 kbps.
Actualy this is not a push for open-source, but a push for alternatives. BBC, from what I understand is not really happy with Real and it looking to find other formats. Over at Radio 1 they are testing Windows Media formats.
Let the opensource, linux, anti-microsoft, beowulf cluster, and the other flames begin.
symetrix. We are building a religion, a limited edition.
I dunno about that, but it just seems damn boring when I listen to it from here in Australia. "All Things Considered" would have to be the worlds most boring radio program, with the worlds dullest presenters. Australian public radio stations are much more interesting.
I always understood ogg had a lowest bitrate of 64k, which is still a bit high for us modem-connected users.
455fe10422ca29c4933f95052b792ab2
yes, this is a small evolutional step. but when does the simulcasting revolution begin? i'm itching for something akin to broadcast: where we only use bandwidth once, not in multiples of however many listeners we have.
That or somebody over at the BBC thinks that it just sounds better, costs less, or any number of other advantages that Ogg Vorbis has over MP3. Using a peice of software just because it's open source seems pretty silly to me. Use a peice of software because it's better, and if that happens to be OSS that's great. If not, then it probably means that the open source community needs to focus their attention on it.
Merry X-mas all..
I posted to
This is great! A broadcasting entity as large and well respected as Auntie Beeb boosting Ogg Vorbis is exactly the push it needs. This will also same the BBC a huge amount of money. Thomson is collecting a lot of money for Franuhoffer for every MP3 stream...money that they could use in a lot of other ways. (Maybe this will result in a reduction of the radio licence fee? Nah...) Hopefully all the other broadcasters will look at this for an example.
I'm sure the opportunity to thumb their noses at the French (Thomson) and the Germans (Fraunhoffer) had nothing to do with their decision either.
"How perfectly Goddamn delightful it all is, to be sure" Charles Crumb
Altogether, I think we in the US should be glad that we have NPR. It has its problems, but it provides at least a little bit of balance in an otherwise very bleak media landscape.
And it begs the question "Why?" Lossless = Zip, Rar, Jar, Ace, Arj and a bunch of other compressions. But if I can't hear the difference, what's the difference? Whoever set the human ability to hear equal to the 44,1kHz of a CD? For a select few it's maybe more, but for me it's definately less. Lame using the --remix command is more than enough for my ears (actually overkill, but I assume I someday *might* regret not setting it that high). Considering that many ppl are happy with 128kb CBR, I'm probably even picky.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
He plays the most eclecytic music of any DJ in the world - if this were the only good thing the BBC did then the BBC would be a great organisation.....
He's on Tuesday, Wednesday & Thursday every week from 10-12 gmt.
I've been listening to the vorbis stream for a while now - we were never quite sure whether wewanted teh server slashdotted or not - I guess christmas day will be quieter than usual. But I think the resources available are a lot more limited than the real or wimpy machines.
Oh yeah - make sure to e-mail the people in charge about how you prefer this over Real (and even moreso over WMP)
Maybe you should restrict your listening to Rush Limbaugh and your television watching to FoxNews.
Then you can get good old fashioned right-wing leaning bullshit without none of that pretending to be unbiased crap you get on regular media outlets.
the machine i am at right now is a win2k run Dell laptop. installed the plugin for winamp, which took about 0.5 seconds, and off i went.
;-)
worked great. sounded better than Real, and was much quicker to load.
this is just too cool... makes me think I am glad for not putting all my cd's to mp3
They are not testing it on the radio1/2/3/4/5 - World Service streaming links as they are with media format!
Any thing that will stop the BBC from using an encoder from those bastards at Real.Com has got
to be good.
Real sucks ass.
- Penguin Kicka
The great thing about my beloved BBC is that they aren't scared to experiment. They had a fully functional website long before most American broadcasters knew what the web was.
Unfortunately somethings don't change, and BBC America is showing the Queen's Christmas speech in 5 minutes. Arrgh, run, hide.
your train of thought seems to have derailed, somewhere between acknowledging that NPR is extremist leftist and that they provide balance. Let's examine the facts, shall we?
First NPR is a consortium of individual stations and syndicated radio shows, so we can't paint them with a broad brush. We can discuss their news reporting and news shows, though (all things considered, weekend edition, morning edition). And the fact is, they are staffed by extreme liberals. It has been said that conservative reports are reports to report the news; liberal reporters are reporters to affect public opinion. Consider that the (non-financial) news networks (with the exception of Fox news, which is more popular than CNN, despite being available in fewer homes) are also extremely liberal.
MY local public radio station plays an hour of BBC news (with some chick Victoria) at 5:00 am each morning. I listen to half an hour of it in a groggy half sleep mode, yet it is more informative, and has less bias than 2 hours of NPR news following it.
Additionally, NPR news consists of incredible amounts of filler material, and pathetic human interest stories.
I do support public radio (on a local/state level), where the bias is not present. But NPR news efforts should either be retired, or required to acknowledge that they are democratic shills.
Even more important, users should download XMMS, which supports Vorbis on UNIX or FreeAMP which supports Ogg Vorbis on UNIX and Windows via a plugin.
Then (and this is the most important bit) go to BBC and use it to stream content.
The low-bandwith music on BBC-1 is still pretty bad, but about as good as anything else I've heard. It's stellar on the high bandwidth BBC-1 stream, however. It's heavy on the treble, where I'm used to having to boost that range.
I'm having a little trouble EQing to correct for the high treble. It seems to have a huge upward curve on the high end where other CODECs just chop or only represent simple harmonic overtones. That makes it a little harsh on some things, but it's nicer than the sensation of listening underwater or through a tube that Real & MS give.
At home, I run nothing but main and contrib Debian GNU/Linux. No non-free. This means no RealPlayer, no Quicktime, no MS Media. Nothing that I don't get source for. This has also meant no video and audio clips on news sites.
I've been searching for quite some time for a daily news site with MPEG video and MP3 audio, but have found absolutely nothing noteworthy.
Enter the BBC. Admittedly, audio streaming is just a start, but if I were forced to pick the BBC for fully free audio/video news and streaming entertainment, I'd be the last to complain. :)
I hope someone from NPR is reading this, too :)
Sure, but I hope that Microsoft or Real isn't. The two formats they support aren't free an any sense.
If you truely want to promote a format that you could count on in the future, write to the BBC telling them the honest truth about the streams. Don't lie, but also explain your somewhat interest in a widely used open source music compression format [codec].
I really do want to store my entire music collection on CDs - but not a standard audio cd format. MP3 would be good, but it's large and isn't free, although mo'free than WMA and RA. Being able to add a folder to my CD containing the source [or latest CVS mainline] lets me feel safe that later on down the road I may be able to play those songs.
I don't care if P2P systems don't want to support it - I just want it to be continually developed.
Get your Unix fortune now!
Good to hear...
Better to feel...
hm... best to actually do something!
Hope they're not slashdotted with mails now, but a certain amount of SMTP-type response can't be bad. i did my part.
"Public" radio wouldn't exist if conservative Republicans were to decide the issue, they like "private sector" solutions. So why be surprised that the government-employed workers at public stations display a bias toward the concept that governments have social obligations (the "left-Demo" view)?
Similarly, a "conservative" public radio wouldn't be streaming ogg vorbis. You'd more likely get a nice, corporate-friendly wma stream, or some other closed, proprietary standard (a helping hand to the "private sector").
I survived the Dick Cheney Presidency 7 to 9 AM 7-21-07
This is too cool.
:)) and Ogg is the way to do that because it can be used on all platforms. I'm surprised they've been testing Windows Media (they're actually testing that to a greater extent to Ogg) because that limits them so much. Real they use because it does video too, and was probably the best option when they originally setup their streaming services all those years ago.
The BBC, in their nature, are the most bias-free, impartial news reporting service in the world. The biggest alternatives, MSNBC are obviously going to edge more towards the side of MS related properties (whether or not they say otherwise) and CNN... well CNN is owned by the world's largest media-congolomerate - AOL Time Warner (a company much more scary and powerful than MS could ever hope to be). The BBC is owned by the people and is therefore advertisement free. It's fabulous.
Replacing their Real streams with Ogg is great for many reasons. It means I can get rid of the horrible, bloated application that is Real Player (now Real One) and use Winamp instead. It means on my Mac I can listen with the various OS X players (Real for OS X isn't available I believe) and it means that if I decided to move to a Linux desktop, I'd have it on there too.
In fact this is probably why the BBC want to move to. Not counting the fact that licensing Real costs them money, but part of the BBC mandate is to provide their services to as many people in the UK as possible (sorry to disappoint the folks across the world, but the BBC is a public service over here, so we come first
It'll be interesting to see if they find an alternative to Real for video too, I believe they want to start doing BBC News 24 (their 24 hour digital TV news service) streaming over the net as well...
From the point of view of the British TV license owner, for a little over £100 a year the BBC provide us with at least 2 TV channels (more if you have digital), an amazingly comprehensive online service, countless radio stations (at least 5, with others depending on your region) and all of it is completely and utterly advertising free. And, thanks to their promise (they make yearly promises to the British public of things they'll do) to reach out to as many people as possible, and make everything integrate as well as possible - all the radio is available online too. Programs on digital TV are interactive, most programs have a website, and they don't treat the Internet as some mystical magical place for geeks, but as another part of everyday life, just like the Radio and TV.
So three cheers for the BBC.
I'll shut up now.
London, Jan 3, 2002
In an unprecedented legal twist, the BBC's website has been taken offline, and will stay offline pending the outcome of a legal dispute.
Following the BBC's decision to trial the use of the inherently insecure Ogg Vorbis format, the Recording Industry Association of America, in a case heard by the San Franscisco District Court, won an injunction against the BBC, with the order that name service to all BBC internet domains be terminated, effectively making the BBC sites unreachable.
"This is our opportunity to wipe out all open source music distribution", said an RIAA spokesman who declined to be named. "We intend to use this case as a step towards banning all insecure digital music formats. The next step is getting Microsoft to change XP to make it impossible to play insecure media such as MP3, then to lobby for laws to ban ISPs from accepting connections from customers who aren't running content-secured operating systems. It'll take about 2 more years, but I'm confident we will prevail".
-- In the beginning was the WORD, and the WORD was UNSIGNED, and the main(){} was without form and void...
Yeah, and someone should tell OSDN about this fact...
after all, I found the kernel 2.5 summit audio files
in mp3 format, and not ogg.
(osdn.com/conferences/kernel)
Is there a reason for this?
I used the plug in from the BBC site for winamp.
tried for 10 mins... not working.
looks like windows media will win
Actually the one thing that all news which is incredibly biased has in common is that they keep telling you how unbiased they are.
You won't find that on the BBC, NPR, CNN, NBC, etc.
In fact the only stations that keep telling you that they are unbiased are FoxNews and EIB network(Rush Limbaugh). Now that should make you wonder, but I'm sure you haven't thought that far ahead in your argument.
Let's examine the facts, shall we?
Facts about what, you moron? The facts of what constitutes your opinion of political direction?
Did you get a copy of "Trolling for complete fuckwads" for Christmas?
I ask because I heard Trolaxor has lost his you see, and he'd very much like it back.
I suggest you give Project Mayhem a try - it's arguably the most quality-conscious audio forum on the internet, and you'll find alternatives to FLAC which I think your ears will be very happy with (i.e. MusePack -insane).
That aside, you are never going to see 'common' people trading FLAC or APE files between themselves, the benefit to the few simply doesn't outweigh the 6-fold increase in time and storage needs for the many.
Slashdot, Dec 25, 2001
In a fully precedented and wholely unsurprising post on Slashdot, heretic108 made the same blinkered mistake that many idiots repeat. In his post, he made the classic mistake of thinking that the BBC, the UK state owned broascaster, would give two fucks about a court decision made by the San Fransisco District Court.
When faced with this news, heretic108 immediatly looked confused, at first refusing to believe that anything could possibly exist outside of the United States of America. "No way man! Those places are made up for like, episodes of Jackass. The UK was invented by MTV!"
No one was available for comment from Slashdot at the time of going to press.
Until 20-30 years from now when they'll be claiming THEY invented the darn thing ....remember HYPERLINKS anyone ?!?!?
It is not possible to be unbiased. Every news organization has editors which choose what to publish/air and how to present it. Because the editors are human, they will have a bias. Because employers tend to hire employees with views the employer is comfortable with (especially interviewees recommended by someone else in the organization), organizations tend to develop distinct biases not matter how hard they try to not be biased.
To mangle an ancient koan:
I know it is slightly off-topic but LAME 3.9x has been released. I don't remember seeing any announcements on slashdot. it has a new set '--alt-preset' settings, and default setting, '--alt-preset standard' which gives about 192Kbps on average is *quite* good. The fact is that mp3 still dominates, and hence the rationalle for improving LAME. If you don't mind the rate > 128Kbps, give new LAME a try.
Credibility is everything in the commerical acceptance game. You need to look it, act it, and *least* importantly have the goods to back it up. Examples come and go of tech that gets ditched even though its better.
Pick a new name for Ogg Vorbis. I would consider myself a geek but at a glance when I first read about it, I had NFI what was going on.
Something snazzy, something that implies audio. [and im not qualified to make suggestions]
And it's just at 0. Where are you, moderators?
An esoteric scratched itch:
Homeworld Map Maker Tool
I must say, the ogg stream sounds real good. It took me about 1,5 minutes to get it working (winamp plugin on winXP -- yeah yeah... shoot me -> this is my gaming rig ;-).
;-)
I'm a fan!
If xiph just got version 1.0 out soon... I could start working on my jukebox
# lynx -head -dump http://news.bbc.co.uk
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Wed, 26 Dec 2001 00:31:05 GMT
Server: Apache/1.3.14 (Unix)
# lynx -head -dump http://www.bbc.co.uk
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Wed, 26 Dec 2001 00:31:25 GMT
Server: Apache/1.3.14 (Unix)
Someone over there may be a big open source advocate.
"that's not encryption - it's a new perl script that I'm working on..." - from some Matrix parody
All partisanship aside, I think this is excellent, and I have been hoping that someone like BBC will do this for some time.
I've been listening to this for the past few hours, and the radio seems excellent. It's kind of rare to listen to English radio here in New Zealand.
Of course if I wanted to be partisan I could also add that I don't like the bloat that comes with Real, and I can't listen to Windows Media on my non-Windows system.
I do hope the BBC continues to offer this choice in the future.
a) I used to think the same thing (for a glimmer of a speck of the thin side of a scanty moment), but changed my mind before the gel could set.
... but at least part of this line of thought is valid, I think.]
b) words acquire meaning through use. When people ("most people") say "MP3," they sure as heck aren't thinking "Layer 3 of a certain spec from the Motion Picture Experts Group." They're thinking "emm pee thrie -- three great sounds that sound great together." Or even "empythree." Which is to say, it's just a few syllables serving as a name, not the abbreviation it really is at heart. "doubleya emm eff" has no more cognitive strength except to a small number of people who know (but don't need to know, exactly)what those letters / sounds stand for.
c) As (not when) Ogg catches on, it will be catchier, "stickier" and more fun than some marketing department-style contrivance. ("SoundChunk"? "Earbit"? "AudiAll"?). Apple is a funny name for computers, but it's not just a "so what?" -- it's actually a strength of Apple. [Weak point, I know: "Apple" has a clean, interesting sound, food associations, as well as previous associations like Apple Records, intriguing religious / artistic connections, too
d) Heh, "Ogg should change its name" and "No it shouldn't" have perhaps become one of the standard slashdot sub-plots for the ages, but I know I come down on the "Keep it, love it, revel in it" side.
Cheers,
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
I've been watching news.bbc.co.uk for a couple of years now and I think it's safe to say the BBC is definately pro open source. I have read a number of articles dealing with Operating Systems and they have overwhelmingly leant towards promoting free software and in particular linux.
:)
Whether or not their web staff are linux orientated, their journalists are certainly well learned
I suppose in a way it makes sense - for anyone that is unaware the BBC is a state funded corporation. As a consequence their budget isn't exactly huge, so they would want to keep costs down. (Despite their low bugdet the BBC does provide excellent television and radio - far superior to the commercially funded channels available in the UK. And there are no advertisements! (commercials) )
BBC using ogg has nothing to do with open source, they are using it to reach a wider audience and because it is superior, because it suits them better, they dont care if it is open source or not.
If you ignore ACs because they are anonymous - you're an idiot.
With Ogg Vorbis we have a good, streamable mp3-type audio encoding that satisfies pretty much all sound needs... We've got nothing for video, however.
Most sites out there seem to offer all three of real, quicktime, and bill's media player, as there still isn't a clear winner in the area. Still ample opportunity for Ogg Tarkin or DivX2, but they need to be as good as or better then all three of the commercial alternatives, in cpu use, streaming, file size, etc. I have a feeling this is going to be much more of a challenge for video then it was for audio, and if an open source solution can't pull it off, eventually the winner of the video battle (probably microsoft) will win the audio battle for free.
tried again (RTFM)
;p
I had mad plug in installed... that made a conflict.
well anyway... nice sound quality - but I need my Mad plugin back
IP Multicasting is already availabe, and multicast-based services have worked reliably despite the load that was placed on general news content the few days following 2001-09-11, which is quite remarkable. (Well, IRC and Usenet kept working, too...)
Unfortunately, Joe Average does not demand multicasting support, so you have to look very closely in order to find an ISP which supports it. AFAIK, here in Germany, you can get multicast support almost everywhere, but of course at rates which are not affordable for personal use.
In theory, multicasting is very interesting for ISPs, too: you receive the traffic once and account it seperately for each customer. Unfortunately, multicasting requires quite an investment to get started, both in man hours and hardware (although most hardware nowadays supports multicasting, but maybe not in an optimal way).
BBC is streaming Ogg at 44kbps, and it seeoms to be working just fine.
No, follow the money. "Mister Congressman," the NPR guy would beg, "We need more money so that we can implement streaming audio."
"Okay, I'll support more funding for you if you consider using this codec that is marketed by a company in my district......"
"Sure thing, sir. Anything you want."
NPR would be the first to use Microsoft, just like the rest of the Government.
Viable open-source players and streaming mechanisms need to be pitched to the commercial broadcasters (I am one, BTW) as an economically-viable way for them to increase their audience. NPR doesn't care about its audience; it doesn't have to. NPR will exist so long as the politicians decide to keep it in existance, even if *nobody* listens. NPR doesn't care about making money; it doesn't have to. NPR, therefore, never does anything groundbreaking.
You're not going to use a free and superior format because some zealotous troll was having fun? Damn, you are a fucknut. Nice post, though!
Quicktime streaming server is free, open source and is available at http://www.opensource.apple.com/projects/streaming /
binary distros and of course the source are there for
Mac OS X
* FreeBSD 3.5
* Red Hat Linux 6.2
* Solaris 7
* Windows NT Server/Windows 2000 Server
-Ben
If commercial radio stations are going to wait for "pitchmen" to arrive to sell them on ogg vorbis, it's going to be a long wait. The open source movement doesn't have a skank-and-crank budget like the record promotors do.
I survived the Dick Cheney Presidency 7 to 9 AM 7-21-07
I thought that Ogg was suppost to put all the most important bits at the beginning of it's frames. Therefore you could stream out a 128kbps ogg and if someone is on dialup it will automatically scale to suit their connection speed.
I'm guessing this never made it to the format? Too bad cause that would have been great!
Ew, ew, ew! This is horrible.
I don't dislike the BBC, but I dislike the practice of every TV owner in the UK being forced (you go to *prison* otherwise) to pay £100 (US $150) a year to go to a company you might even be interested in.
Why should I pay $150 a year just to own a TV if all I use the TV for is to watch DVDs and play Playstation? It's frightfully socialist, and the sooner they scrap the licence fee and allow the BBC to make its money in a decent capitalist way, the better.
(Note for American readers: Once upon a time you had to have a licence to even own a radio in the UK.. and, believe it or not, you had to have a licence to own a dog. The UK will tax you for anything and everything they can get away with.. and we don't even have a constitution to prevent it.)
mogorific carpentry experiments
Now that all of you have access to a great Radio 1 feed, perhaps I should fill you in on what you can listen to on this wonderful station.
The big problem is that it's Christmas, so they've taken off the regular good DJs (Chris Moyles, Sara Cox, Mark and Lard etc) and replaced them with really crappy ones (Vicky Marsden, Scott Mills, Jamie Theakston).
But.. today (Boxing Day), there's a good music show on at 10pm GMT (5pm EST).. it's John Peel (been a DJ for 40 years, somewhat of a British musical god) presenting 50 of the best voted songs.
And on regular weekdays, you get the regular wonderful lineup (this is from Thursday I'd guess):
7am GMT (2am EST) - Sara Cox.. northern lass, you Americans won't be able to understand her cute accent.
1pm GMT (8am EST)- Mark and Lard.. two weird northern comedians with crap sense of humor but funny none the less.
3pm GMT (10am EST)- Chris Moyles.. a radio comedy GOD! Plays the typical crap from the charts, but is a comic genius.. plenty of laughs on this show.
10pm GMT (5pm EST) Tues, Weds, Thurs only - John Peel.. a guy who plays everything that's either weird, independent or new.. like The White Stripes, The Strokes, and all sorts of crazy nonsense. Gotta love it.
DJs to avoid include the god-awful Scott "I wish I was Pat Sharp" Mills, and Jamie "I wish I didn't look like Pat Sharp" Theakston. Other than that, Radio 1 is a top station.
Radio 4, on the other hand, is a generally dull talk station run by the British elite to brainwash the British public to their socialist trains of thought.
Its awesome to be able to recieve Radio-1 With better quality, the stream running 64kbps on Ogg sounds noticibly better than the old streams i used to listen to.. .great to put on at a party in the background a radio 1 essential mix.... :)
only one question... How would one save the files after broadcast? (i.e. to save the essential mix broadcasts?)
Is not life a hundred times too short for us to bore ourselves? -Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
The server software lacks the infrastructure to peel the files, but it's totally there in the codec.. Actually, thats how the bitrate limiting in RC3 works: By performing peeling in the encoder.. Later this should get moved into ice cast.
I accept the badge of "fucknut" with honor, sir. Because what's the correct response for out-of-control slashdot zealotry?
MORE ZEALOTRY! I cancel his use of Ogg out. That way, perhaps saner heads -- you know, people who use software as a tool, not as a way to relive the glory of high school student-level politics -- will prevail and make Ogg into something truly useful for everyone, not just the GNU/elite.
But, thanks for the compliment!
you think your so cool? ur just a fag man, look at your homepage!!! give me your ip gay little windows user and ill fuck u up real good
If you ignore ACs because they are anonymous - you're an idiot.
my electronic music geek friends and i have a site at dot9 and we are in the process of having all our music encoded to ogg. unfortunately we have to educate a lot of the people who d/l the songs about the format, but i guess we're doing our part to spread the knowledge of ogg vorbis and it's amazing low bitrate encoding.
digitallyimported.com had a Vorbis stream for awhile. It was up and down all the time because they were always messing with it. It was 80kbps, but sounded better than the 128kbps MP3 stream. They've taken it down citing too much work.
I've played with Icecast's Vorbis support, and frankly, it was kind of a pain in the ass to get working. Administering a whole bunch of servers with it would most likely be a big pain. mod_mp3 for apache supports Vorbis though, I've suggested that to DI, hopefully they will check it out.
Need Free Juniper/NetScreen Support? JuniperForum
They seem to be running Apache on Solaris and Linux for news.bbc.co.uk.
They have a more up to date version of Apache for www.bbc.co.uk.
Have glance at the 212.58.224/24 netblock.
You mentioned FLAC and other lossless codec format.
My question is - WHERE to find them?
Thanks in advance !
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
So who cares
Anyway, when I first saw Fox I serious thought it was a parody, for instance the parodies of current affairs shows on our Channel 4 isn't a patch on Fox. I wouldn't call fox a valid news network for any political persuasion, from lefties to far rights, nobody in the UK would seriously aggregate their news from that channel, it simply isn't valid journalism whatever your biases.
I'd say Fox News is a conservative (with a little 'c') outlet without any doubt, not that there's anything wrong with that, but be under no impression it's certainly not "liberal". I'd say CNN is also viewed as conservative in Europe and around the wrold, Fox is farther right than that. The UK doesn't quite equate with Europe though.
If you manage to watch a true liberal news network then you will probably be choking on your tea also! Murdoch runs SkyNews in the UK, it would be interesting to see what you would make of that, you would probably label it neo-communist, in the UK however it is perceived as being tabloid junk but with pictures!
How long before Apple speaks up and says they already have a patent on this technology?
Maybe, but they covered all those unhealty-isms in blackadder so well that it is well worth the money. The rest of the world has to make do with the DVD compilation.
(a british citizen who doesnt pay the tv tax on account of being abroad)
Your political spectrum is rather miscalibrated; perhaps you simply have never stuck your head out of the muck of mainstream US political life. There is essentially no leftist or moderate reporting in the US. There is conservative reporting (NPR) and nutty right-wing populist reporting (just about everything else). Why you feel so insecure in your right wing views that you want to silence even the last of the not-quite-so-right-wing radio stations escapes me; is 99% of the spectrum and airtime not enough for you?
The BBC streaming Ogg Vorbis is good as it can reach the widest audience and is inexpensive.
That is the gist of the letter I am writing to the CBC. Be a good idea for others to write to their public broadcasters and tell them this. Also remind them they are at least partly supported by us, the taxpayers (even if only thru nonprofit status)and we want value.
Merry Xmas
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
And this is off-topic exactly how? Because a cracksmoking moderator disagrees with it...
I survived the Dick Cheney Presidency 7 to 9 AM 7-21-07
Slightly offtopic, but I noticed that Serious Sam Second Encounter uses Ogg Vorbis - I found that cool. I hope more game developers start using Ogg. Way to go Croteam! Ranjit.
rmathew.com
that this is a great move also for privacy concerns. Real and
Microsoft players are both well known spyware.
Good point. I mean, so Java is not bundled with Windows. So Ogg is not bundled with Windows. Heck, *RealPlayer* and *QuickTime* are not bundled with Windows. So does that stop people from installing QuickTime or RealPlayer or the JRE? Hey, with WinME, XP etc, Windows Media Player has been a very prominent addition. But people still get Winamp, Sonique etc. They still install Quicktime on their PCs.
Point is, users != sheep. Given a reasonably easy install procedure, they can indeed download and install a plugin. Heck, on windows, installing binary code off the web is a piece of cake (one reason malwares love windows
PS. Even now, Winamp 2.78 "Lite" clocks in at 502 kB. Those guys at Nullsoft sure have a good thing going in terms of Winamp2x.
One of the promising features of Real streams is multicast, which, should multicast routing capabilities be widely employed, can offload the Internet a great deal.
Does any streaming specification exist which makes use of multicast for Ogg or MP3 streams?
My exception safety is -fno-exceptions.
Back then when i was young and innocent i downloaded all my music in real audio snippets.
Then i moved to Linux and installed the latest Linux Realplayer.
One day it poped up something about "out of date" but i didnt find anything new for Linux on the real site. The once working player refused to function..
it seems mp3 draws the line between free formats and controlled ones...
Firstly, the BBC is not a business. Its a non profit (well, actually, its 2 companies, one of which is non profit, one of which is for profit. I wonder which pays for internet streaming...?)
Secondly, I doubt they offer technical support on their current Real streams anyway. They're a traditional to air broadcaster, ultimately they don't get any revenue off of Internet streaming anyway. I'm not even clear *why* they do it at all (but I'm damn glad they do).
Thirdly, I seem to recall having to install real player...
Fourthly, this is Mac OS where I'm sitting, so I'm not exactly getting Windows Media player installed out of the box either.
Oh, I see your point, but you overstate the case.
Lord Pixel - The cat who walks through walls
A little bigger on the inside than out
It all depends on the perceived benefit by the people. For now, I don't think the motivation for Ogg Vorbis is enough, but if the patent infringement crackdowns get big, users could switch to something else.
It's possible at least.
wow, so many good issues brought up.
1. thanks for the support.
spiffy. it's nice to know that others will rush to my defense when there's a dumbass afoot. and certainly when a response isn't dignified.
2. sometimes, i'm a dumbass too.
simulcast n : a broadcast that is carried simultaneously by radio and television (or by FM and AM radio)
more specifically, multiple Tx's. ie. GPS satellites.(differnt id's yes, but differnt delays from the same master timecode.
multicast: communication between a single sender and multiple receivers on a network
a la IPv6
unicast: communication between a single sender and a single receiver over a network
a la IPv4 p2p
so, in a lapse of concentration while passing back into normal space (what you know as 3D reality), i had a slip of the tounge. i meant multicast, a la IPv6. i'm a dumbass.
nice to know that most of you, that took the time to read what i said, understood what i meant.
3. my view of codecs.
is ogg wonderful? why not. is ogg great because it's free & open? sure. rah rah rah. will ogg rock my world? probably not. here's why. after ogg there will be something else. something better. it's evolution baby (PJ rocks!). just like divx/mpeg4 is all the rage for videos today. yesterday it was mpeg2. tomorrow it will be mpeg5.
4. now some clarification and insight on what needs to be done.
i picture the different OSI layers like spinning plates (radiohead reference - these musicans know more than they lead on!). the top of the stack of plates is spinning fastest. (layer7: apps, codecs, etc.) the bottom plate is spinning the slowest. (layer1: physical electrical/light impulses). IPv6 kinda covers Network, Transport, & Session layers (3-5). but it influences everything.
on the top end, we have the apps. all they need is a few changes in code. easy as pie.
in the middle, we have IPv6. and on towards the bottom we have the phsycal equipment and fiber optic lines. problem is, so much of these lower layers are intermixed. what i mean is, you might think your special because your router is software upgradable to IPv6. but really, to do multicasting right, the whole network topology will need some shuffling. and because those "plates" spin slower and slower towards the bottom... it takes a long time. (kind of ironic that progress along each layer costs about the same)
and hence, my origional posting about my impatience for all this to happen.
as usual, google know's all about the mBone.
cheers.
thanks for the support.
follow-up is here
thanks for the support.
;)
follow-up is here
love the stories. and the cool satellite-radio wrist watch. that stuff is exciting. with people like you and i we can make this stuff happen! i'm sure your measure of happiness will be far greater tho.
I went for a job at BBC R&D last year, who live in Kingswood Warren, a country house in the midst of the Surrey bantustans. The work they do there is amazing, a great opportunity for playing with new toys in the net broadcasting field, as well as hosting the encoders and root broadcast servers for the network (the web servers and the Real network have mirrors on the east and west coast of the States and at Telehouse in London's Docklands among other places). But for travelling (from the East End to the stockbroker belt, and that it was more of a support job than a sysadmin job, it would have been great.
Their job, among other things, is to get the best value for money possible and the best reach possible. Real are now charging stupid sums for their licensing. RealOne appears to have broken Tara's Real plugin for WinAmp, and the player is appallingly intrusive. Ogg Vorbis is free, everyone with Windows has Media Player, it seems logical. I'll be voting yes if I can listen to Danny Baker on BBC London without Real.
Thanks for your comments so far - interesting reading! Plenty of conspiracy theories, some close, some way out ;-)
One of the main reasons we're currently looking at Ogg is that BBC is interested in investigating other solutions than Real (since we started using it 5 years ago, it has been the most widely supported cross platform solution), and rather than get tied into another proprietry solution, we're instead looking for an "open standard" solution, which theoretically could be played in any player. We've looked at MPEG4 and other such solutions, but Ogg has come the closest so far to meeting our requirements.
Yes, we're also looking at solutions like WMP, but the biggest downside with going for another proprietry solution is that it doesn't really extend our audience (almost everyone who can play WMP can also play Real), and to remain impartial, if we support Real and WMP, why not Quicktime as well. Why not all the other streaming formats (particularly the java-player ones which have become popular again). For each extra format, we have to add another set of encoders, and another set of servers (and whne you consider we've got over 50 encoding chains at the moment...)
Anyway, I can't promise anything for the future. Maybe Ogg will work for us, maybe not. We've had a lot of positive feedback, which is nice - keep sending it in! The key thing is that it *has* to be easy to use for the end user. We're not talking about techies here, we're talking about all those families who got a PC for Christmas. If we can serve a streaming format which people can play on whatever computer they've got, under whatever OS they run, on whatever connection they've got to the Internet, and it sounds as good as any other solutions, then we've found our ideal solution!
Simon Lockhart - Internet Engineering Manager, BBC Internet Services
This is just awesome for two reasons: the BBC online sounds great now. I've been listening to the Real stream for a long while now, and the OGG stream sounds much better. The second reason why this is awesome is because it's a big shot in the arm for OGG. This might be the core of the big snowballing effect that puts OGG on everybody's computer. After that, deciding about what format you stream in should be a no brainer: OGG is free and sounds great and isn't dominated by some nasty US corporate types.
It varies a bit actually between 42 and 54 kbps at a sampling freq of 44 khz.
Hi,
;-) again.
how can one save a scheduled programm to disk, say John Peel?
Real tries to make this nearly impossible. Is this easier with Vorbis?
I would really like to listen to the Mighty Mighty Peel
Bye egghat.
-- "As a human being I claim the right to be widely inconsistent", John Peel
Why use the IE operating system when you can just use a browser? IE is McRosoft's .NET portal, and as such must include all its' usual bloat (hidden flight sims, heehee aren't we clever who gives a fuck if it takes the binary over the 3 exabyte mark)
Sometimes I have to d/l summat from the office box (lose98se). All I can say is that I'm glad to get home to Opera Lin5x or Konqueror. How people put up with such a flaky whale of an inflexible handles-like-a-tanker watch-it-blow-up-in-your-face rushed-out amateur code-rot as the front end for their "O"S beats me. Still, not my problem.
Lucius Sour