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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
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.
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)
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
Well, you're right, Ogg Vorbis streaming is cool, but unfortunately it won't work for the BBC in the long run, for reasons you've put in your post.
The problem is that you had to install something to your base system in order to listen to the stream. There are millions (yes, millions) of users who don't want to have to install anything else, they just want things to work straight of the box. These are exactly the sort of people BBC doesn't want calling their tech support. Any costs saved by avoiding Microsoft license fees get eaten up by the phone calls and e-mails that these people will send to the BBC asking "how the heck do I install this silly plugin thing?"
Microsoft isn't about to give up their licensing fee revenue stream without a fight, and so they're not going to include the Ogg Vorbis codec in the Media Player anytime soon.
The BBC is a business. They don't care anything about "free" software versus things they have to pay for. The question is, which costs more: Providing tech support to people so that they can view their content, or writing one simple check to Microsoft. Unfortunately, the business solution is to just pay Microsoft, it's probably cheaper.
Sad, but true.
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]
# 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
Is this really any different from websites having "Needs Real Player to play" or "Needs Microsoft Media Player to play" (download here) links that nigh on every website with streaming media already has on it?
IMHO, one of two things will happen if/(or more likely when) Ogg Vorbis becomes a widely used format - either a particular media player will be picked as the Ogg vorbis 'Champion' - possibly the new version of Winamp which I believe will include the ogg vorbis plugin by default, or a nice download page which let's you choose your operating system, media player and click download to get an executable that will install it.
People have been blindly installing plugins for years now - I don't think that they are particularly likely to stop just because a plugin is opensource.
...and you only have to download it once, anyway.
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.
Well, you're right, Ogg Vorbis streaming is cool, but unfortunately it won't work for the BBC in the long run, for reasons you've put in your post.
The problem is that you had to install something to your base system in order to listen to the stream. There are millions (yes, millions) of users who don't want to have to install anything else, they just want things to work straight of the box. These are exactly the sort of people BBC doesn't want calling their tech support. Any costs saved by avoiding Microsoft license fees get eaten up by the phone calls and e-mails that these people will send to the BBC asking "how the heck do I install this silly plugin thing?"
Microsoft isn't about to give up their licensing fee revenue stream without a fight, and so they're not going to include the Ogg Vorbis codec in the Media Player anytime soon.
Hmm, good point, it is for this reason that we should all trundle over here and figure out how to submit our public comments on the Microsoft settlement, under the Tunney act. It would be just plain anticompetitive for Microsoft to freeze out the Ogg codec, wouldn't it? Now that you made me think about it, Microsoft will be far from in the clear on this, even after the Tunney comment period.
The BBC is a business. They don't care anything about "free" software versus things they have to pay for.
Once again, good point. The BBC is of course a business, and has to worry about the potential cost of encoding the stream for broadcasting. Hence the attraction of Ogg. Even if Microsoft doesn't charge BBC a fee right now for encoding WMF, they're certain to slap one on if they get control of the market. BBC isn't dumb enough to miss this little point. Then there's the problem of customers potentially being charged by Microsoft to listen to the streams, or being restricted by end user licenses in how they can listen to them, which could limit or erode BBC's market. Yes indeed, BBC has some very good reasons for looking hard at Ogg.
The question is, which costs more: Providing tech support to people so that they can view their content, or writing one simple check to Microsoft. Unfortunately, the business solution is to just pay Microsoft, it's probably cheaper.
Paying Microsoft is never cheaper in the end, not if you want to stay competitive.
Life's a bitch but somebody's gotta do it.
"Banned book"? What was it?
This next song is very sad. Please clap along. -- Robin Zander
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.
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.
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!
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
Lol, funny you should say that, the BBC do actually have a hand in crafting the MPEG Layer II and III formats believe it or not!
:)
It all started in the late 80's when they were finalising the Digital Audio Broadcasting (DAB/Digital Radio) spec with the Eureka 147 Consortium, the group responsable for developing the Digital Radio spec.
Anyway they had solved the problem of creating a digital distribution network but the problem was a PCM channel took up the entire multiplex, so Fraunhofer started to develop a perceptual audio codec that would compress the audio and allow many stations in the same multiplex, and so the MPEG audio layers were born. Then the popular growth of the Internet came along, added to the source code available on the Fraunhofer FTP and the rest is history, unfortunately, so are the record companies
The RIAA have a lot to thank BBC R&D for.
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
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.
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
The BBC is of course a business
Not exactly. The BBC is a weird hybrid between a business and a public service. They are of course interested in cost, but profit is not a primary driver (go to the BBC web site and count the ads - there are exactly none).
My wife and a few of my friends work for the BBC (all in IT, but different departments) so here's my informed take on the situation. There is no Ubermind supporting anything software wise at the BBC. They pick the best available tool for the job, especially in the public facing side. They needed streaming media - Real was the choice at the time. Now, after a few years, they are reviewing that choice, and looking at the alternatives. So don't read too much into it.
What is good is that they are neutral - for a lot of applications they have assessed the best tool to be open source or free software. Some of the software that runs the digital TV interactive services runs on Linux of some variety (some is also NT). Their main website (IIRC) runs on Apache.
So, if you get to the stage that the neutral BBC takes a long, deep look at the software then you can a least be comfortable with the knowledge that it's a contender.
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.
In Germany, I pay rather more than £100, but the state sponsored channels still carry the same crap advertisements as the commercial channels (however the breaks are slightly shorter). We also have to have a licence even if we only have a radio. Currently the use of Internet radios and licences is under question. The only people who avoid the TV and radio licence fees are the diplomats.
As a total side note, the German press wrote of Mohammed Atta and Co of September 11th fame, who were studying in Germany that they even paid their TV licenses!!!!!
See my journal, I write things there
You might be right that there will be a "next big thing" in media compression, but I have a feeling this won't be an endless parade. The problem is that compression is doomed to improve more and more slowly as it approaches the asymptote of "no wasted bits." It used to be possible that with a revolutionary compression scheme, a media file would strike the human senses as being just as accurate as ... plug in a file encoded in some pre-revolutionary standard .... The file in the new standard was, however, only half the size.
We've seen this a few times, most recently with MPEG4. And I am willing to bet anything that we will never see this again in all the future of humanity. There is just a limit to how much you can compress something, and pretty soon, no one will be able to detect the next step towards maximal compressability. They'll say: hey, bandwith is more available and storage cheaper. I'll just stick with the old standard, even if its files are 15% larger for the same quality.
That's just how it's gonna be; I honestly think we will have a "last" comression format, which will be tuned tinkered with in a backwards-complatible way (like the brilliant LAME team is doing to MP3). It won't be displaced, because the insentive just won't be there.
I'm certainly not saything that I think this generation of compression technologies will remain forever; I don't think that. I don't even think the next generation will stand the test of time. However, after that what else would force people to en masse abandon the familiar system and go for something better? It won't be the improvement in quality/bitrate ratio, because that part will just stop improving for all practical intent. So why would people swith?
Well, I'd be very happy if the Son of Ogg were the music compression default in our long, audio futures.
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.