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)
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.
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).
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