Slashdot Mirror
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 :)
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.
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)
You aren't british are are you ?, there is no radio licence fee, it's paid for out of the television licence. You may think i'm being pedantic but it's worrying that americans think british people need a licence to own a radio.
They are not testing it on the radio1/2/3/4/5 - World Service streaming links as they are with media format!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
The third release candidate (rc3) is going to be released very soon. Read here.
But I'd advise you not to worry about "1.0". The current release is very stable, you can use it already, no fear.
I pay for the BBC (which isn't state funded - it's funded by the Television Licence which you have to have at any address where there's a television) and moan constantly about the dumming down that goes on there year after year. But (as they so smugly keep on reminding us) the funding mechanism *does* enable them to be more speculative both with content, where the occasional gem surfaces, and technically.
They were very early with teletext services (and today the close captioning still runs via the teletext service). They were early with broadcasting using Nicam. Hell, they were early with broadcasting television at all. They were later than the US with Colour television which is A Good Thing as we run on PAL rather than Never Twice the Same Colour (NTSC - yuk).
They were also pretty early with providing internet services - and it was copyright rather than technology which stopped them putting teletext onto the web/gopher much earlier. They are proud (and yes, a bit smug too) about the amount of emailed listener feedback they get from around the world.
My big fear is that they spend a fortune on external consultants - not that the money is wasted, but that the MacKinsey style suits of the world will advise the senior management at the BBC to climb into bed with, for example, MicroSoft for content delivery. They have a good track record over the last few years of "outsourcing" some absolute jewels of internal resources (the library services, the music library services, the pronounciation unit), and losing the skill and expertise which has been built over more than fifty years.
The BBC seem to be particularly receptive to opinion from overseas listeners, so if you want to remind them that enabling free (whether beer or speech, but preferably speech) technology will increase their listener base in the developing world, then that is a good point to make.
Dunstan
The last scintilla of doubt just rode out of town
Using a piece of software just because it's open source seems
pretty silly to me
Not at all. The BBC has a legal obligation to broadcast to as
many people in the British Commenwealth as possible. Without Ogg
Vorbis I couldn't hear BBC web broadcasts as the commericial
companies who pedal this sort of technology, deems me unworthy of
it's custom.
As a licence payer I expect nothing less that the use of Open
Source software by the BBC. I don't pay £100 a year only to be
told I need to use this piece of software on this piece of
hardware in order to recieve a broadcast I have already paid for.
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