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.
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
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) )
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