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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
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.
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.
And it begs the question "Why?" Lossless = Zip, Rar, Jar, Ace, Arj and a bunch of other compressions.
FLAC is specialized to and optimized for acoustic signals. Try compressing the same WAV under zip and FLAC.
But if I can't hear the difference, what's the difference?
Err, because you're not everybody, and some people *can* tell the difference? Or perhaps you could tell the difference if the rest of your system is good enough - reader, amplifier, speakers, room acoustics, the whole chain.
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.
Your sampling frequency needs to be *at least* twice the highest audible. 20 KHz is supposed to be the highest audible frequency for humans, and for many it's more than adequate (especially for those who never wore earplugs in nightclubs or at rock concerts). I personally was tested up to around 22 KHz, so the 20 KHz limit is bunk. Not only that, but the 2X rule (think about it) is only *in theory*. It assumes perfect filters, which don't exist. In fact you get artifacts well below what's supposed to be the high cutoff for a 44.1 KHz sample stream.
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.
I glad for you, go ahead and listen to the sound the way you like it, but to me and many others the artifacts in 44.1KHz sound are quite audible. As for streams at 128kb, it sounds like it's being played through a phase shifter.
Life's a bitch but somebody's gotta do it.
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.
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) )
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