Slashdot Mirror
BBC Reopens Ogg Streams
garf writes: "Once again, back by popular demand, the BBC has opened up live streaming of Radio 4, to test with the new codecs, especially for modem users. Hop over here.
And for those wishing to listen to Radio 1 try these (link one),
(link two).
But beware: '[Radio 1 streams] are available sporadically at the moment. Don't be surprised if it cuts off, as I've probably just killed it ready for restarting with different settings.'
Please email support to the BBC for their continued support for the ogg format. Happy listening."
NPR should do this since they're kind of the "GNU/Linux" of the radio world. Instead, they only offer support for QuickTime, RealPlayer, and Windows Media streams.
In my opinion, National Public Radio (whose mission is to aid the growth and development of noncommercial radio) should definitely be supporting an open audio standard such as Ogg Vorbis.
If you celebrate Xmas, befriend me (538
That's like testing a car for highway safety with a hydrogen bomb, you know.
"It's not a war on drugs, it's a war on personal freedom. Keep that in mind at all times." Bill Hicks
after everyone slashdots the server it really doesn't give them incentive to attract leaching geeks....
and linking the streams to a slashdot story helps the streams stay up how? :)
- HeyYou
Even lame supports ogg coding through libogg.
merkac
Cool, but useless.
I like the fact that large companies are taking to this standard for media, I have just started using linux much more and looked in my KDE to see that there was this ogg vorbis format, so I ripped a few of my cds with it, and am extremely happy with the result. I then did some research on it and found out that it was open, bonus.If someone can tell me of a portable player that can use this format, I will appreciate it! I would like a durable way to play my music without having to re-rip my songs.
I'm just wondering what they're testing the streaming codecs for, "especially for modem users". If you can control the bitrate, why would you need to test the usability on limited bandwidth? Common sense dictates that if bandwidth audio bitrate, it won't stream. I imagine it would be more useful to test the streaming servers rather than the codec itself.
The future isn't what it used to be.
I seriously don't think .ogg files will ever be able to reach the ascendancy of .mp3 files. The reason is aesthetic- .mp3 sounds slick and space-age, whereas .ogg sounds like egg and/or the noise of vomiting. I do not like eggs or vomit, and I would put neither into my computer.
This might seem like a minor quibble, but I would venture that it's the little things like this (design considerations) that distinguish popular products/formats from the scores of unpopular ones.
visit the hwky website for a lyrical genius infusion.
But alas, Ogg has disappointed me. Although it blows MP3, Real, and especially WMA out of the water on telephone-quality 56k streams, it produced nothing but unpleasantness for me when I attempted to use it to recreate the trebelish peaks and bassive lows of Rachmaninoff's work. In some ways, MP3 was almost easier to listen to, because I had become accustomed to its quirks.
Thus, Ogg has found its niche: low bandwidth applications benefit enormously by the nearly lossless compression that it offers for low-speed streams. As for music distribution - so far there are no clear contenders, but hopefully someday a format will exist that does an acceptable job of re-creating music the way it was meant to be enjoyed.
freebsd guy
I'm glad to see this... MP3's have received so much attention, none of the other codecs haven't been in the news much. Sure, there's the random article comparing 4 or 5 codecs that no one's ever going to use, or the little articles saying that people hear an improvement in Ogg over MP3. But have you seen people using .ogg's? I do. Everything I've ripped is now in Ogg. Better quality, more flexibility, and a superior acoustic model.
I thought listening to the BBC over Ogg was cool. I remembered the first time I'd heard it over shortwave. Not to mention that it worked flawlessly. Then again, I'lve always got the latest plugin for my Winamp, and my XMMS. No annoying RealPlayer crap. No proprietary codecs. It works on my non-Windows boxes.
I sent a brief, yet eloquent note to the BBC webmaster when the original test completion was finished, and will probably send another encouraging this continued project. I would encourage the same from others.
Support your local hackers. (no, not crackers. hackers. Damn Hollywood crap.)
Now I'm thinking about giving ogg a spin but I feel like I'm back where I was when I started making mp3 files.
What encoder to use? What options to use?
Can someone point me in the right direction? Thanks!
this guy knows what's up
The previous ogg streaming by the BBC was excellent to say the least. 128Kbit Ogg gives stunning Quality for music and way more than you need for voice.
/. post work but they are not currently listed on the BBC page.
Unfortunately they are only doing Radio 1 at 64Kbit at the moment which is alot crisper than 64Kbit Mp3 but seems to mess up the treble more.
What is excellent is that you can save the stream to disk which must be the easiest way ever to record your favorite program.
The links for Radio 1 on the
The low bandwidth option runs at vbr around 50Kbit which means you will have to have a very good modem connection for it to work.
Please mail the BBC support about this as I really hate wma and real audio, plus they are inferiour and proprietry.
Primary ogg-related feedback address: oggfeedback@bbc.co.uk
The BBC itself has a pretty extensive feedback gathering mechanism: here are online feedback forms you can fill out:
Feedback form about the BBC website/services
Feedback form about BBC Radio
BBC News suggestions form
But remember: you can gush all you want about the BBC's OGG decision--but I have a feeling the BBC is more interested in how many people are actually tuning in. The best way to get this to stay up is to really listen... and it's worth doing, especially if you're in the US and want 15% less state propaganda in your news. I don't just mean now, as long as this story is on the /. homepage, but next week, too...
Is it me, or does the quality seem horrendously worse than it did before on the "high" quality stream?
You're kidding right? Either that is one whopper of a troll, or you are a wannabe audiophile. *REAL* audiophiles would NEVER use those phrases.
That, and the compositions of Rachmoninoff aren't exactly sonically varied.
If you had put Schoenberg, Mahler or Shostakovich you would have had a little credibility. But Rachmoninoff?
If you are serious, go back and do an actual double blind test (something even real audiophiles have problems doing), then say you can 1) tell the difference between 256k mp3 and 256k ogg AND 2) conclusively say that ogg is worse.
Others who HAVE done this have reached completely different conclusions.
you just know that every Tom, Dick and AC are going to try this service. this being just reopened I wouldn't think BBC have the required iron in place to handle the slashdot effect (very few have). at the end of the day, BBC will think this is a bad idea as it just keep crashing their servers. just my .02 euro.
Acts@core.mailboks.com Acrux@core.mailboks.com Adam@core.mailboks.com Adar@core.mailboks.com Ada@core.mailboks.com
Personally, I blame the snotting. Once CmdrTaco discovered what he can do with other men's jizz, it was all over for Slashdot. I hear he spends all day in his bedroom with Hemos or CowboyNeal playing these "snot" games. Truly a tragedy.
I have never heard BBC radio, so forgive my ignorance.
What are Radio 1, and Radio 4? What is the difference? What about Radio 2, 3, 5... ?
Don't Panic
What's 'snotting' ...? Sounds rather repulsive.
The same is true for all of these encoders.
... anything above that is a bonus.
The fact is, AIFF is absolutely great for digital audio. 24bit, 96khz, overkill.
None of these formats are designed to do anything more than provide acceptable quality over low bandwidth connections.
In circumstances where bandwidth is not a concern, there are far better encoding methods than MP3, Ogg, WMA, etc.
Don't get too stuck on the concept of encoding - it's just a means of overcoming a lack of bandwidth, not an attempt at providing superlative audio quality, though that could be considered a secondary concern in the design.
As long as the audio quality is decent, and the filesizes are low, then the encoder is doing the job it was designed to do
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
Honestly speaking commercial streaming providers are suffering from outragous fee charged for using proprietary codecs. My friend was surprise when RA charged them per *access*. Talking about *free* educational streaming-media website for charity...
Proprietary codec hurts the widespread of multi-media information exchange. WWW would not be the same if it started out as pay-per-acess. I can foresee free codec format could make a revolution, now we only need some big corps create the market drive.
*Hat off to BBC*
Where does this link really go?
Utterly shocked! What's 'snotting'? I think I just fainted. Someone please revive me
Reading the Webpage implies to me that this is one guy at the BBC being allowed to try this out for a limited period:
...
"Update (2002-01-21): Ok, slight bogon."
doesn't sound like the corporate face of the BBC talking!
So it could be that this will only get taken up properly by the BBC if they get positive feedback - they've got a mailing address just for this
There was a bit on this in a recent /. thread:
9 631.
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=26643&cid=287
Seems the show stopper is a lag of cheap floating DSP hardware, that can decode ogg (mp3 can be decoded by integer).
TC - My Photos..
I heard of that website too when I was digging on google to find incriminating stuff about Rob Malda's life to post on Slashdot.
I think Rob spends all his time working on the Jap Slashdot, thats why the english one is going down the crapper!
What do us Americans have to do next? Nuke those Japs again until they have all these weird deformities, like slits for eyes... oh, wait...
By the way, Richard Stallman meets Rob Malda late at night in his backyard for gay geek sex romps!
)o) goatse
I do think the ability of ogg to sound good at low bandwidth is quite a boon. And I mean this in all sincerity, but the market for telephone Asian whores can really be boosted here... if cam girls were all the rage before, then why not phone-sex over the net? I just hate when streaming smut breaks up. This may be just what I need to get my business off the ground.
How could I make recordings of programs broadcast on these streams?
Artificial intelligence is the study of how to make real computers act like the ones in the movies.
You didn't mention which version you tested with. The recently released RC3 (jan 1 2002) is improved over RC2 in the treble area, so if you encoded with RC2, give RC3 a try.
If you want a lossless compression format for audio, check out shorten. It's not as drastic as mp3 or ogg, of course, but it does cut file size in about half.
Btw, the 'way it was meant to be enjoyed' format for Rachmaninov is live performance, not CD, mp3 or ogg.
_KhlER3L
Hi :)
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Note that you need the latest Ogg release (RC3, download here) to play the streams; older versions didn't work for me. They seem to be using some features of Vorbis not available previously (e.g., the web page says, "I've decided to drop Radio 4 to a 32kHz samplerate and use the RC3 'quality' settings instead of enforcing an upper bitrate").
With RC3, things are working beautifully. Good to see such support for an open, free standard.
I saw the reference to Freeamp on http://support.bbc.co.uk/ogg/, so I thought I would give it shot. I downloaded the latest version, and all it does is croak. IE has no problem opening the stream, but when Freeamp tries to, it comes back with: "The stream is not available. Source Not Found". Then I have to kill it in taskmgr as it won't do anything else.
;) But, it doesn't bode well for mass acceptance if it takes more than a miniscule amount of effort to make it work.
Can anybody else get it working, or recommend a better product? Perhaps even something that integrates properly with IE so that when I click on the web page I get music instead of a save dialog.
This is my first attempt with OGG, and so far it hasn't been promising. I'm tired and I'm sure I'll have more energy in the morning
if red had realy matters anymore then ? whioute the bigest distro for linx os but i think linuk nerd will very qusik dvelop soem other good destibouerts when it bugth buy big bad tw aol (just think abut how they made troll tech (bakabone for qt the eh kernel fro kde linux windoweslliek desltop like a big bad for profit company;)
Kudos to the BBC for being innovative and trying something new. As a Scot living in England, I listen to the webcast of BBC Radio Scotland quite a bit (mainly for the football commentaries). However, slightly off-topic, what's with the BBCs funding model? We pay about 100 pounds per household for a TV license, which funds BBC Radio and Televison. No complaints about that, we get some good telly programs, without any irritating commercials. But why is the license fee paying for the website (and satellite and digital telly channels)? Surely they should carry adverts on the website to at least partly defray the cost of the on-line content?
THAT is the kind of trolling slashdot needs most!
There's also FLAC, which is free (GPL/LGPL) and unpatented. It has an option to produce "Ogg-FLAC" files, and may become the lossless Ogg codec in the future.
MP3 is here to stay and OGG sucks. Thank you. (Richard K Harney post)
Kinda harsh, doncha think?
Acquiescence leads to obliteration
The fact is, AIFF is absolutely great for digital audio.
I find FLAC to be "good enough".
Someone set us up the bomb, so shine we are!
I encourage others to give the BBC positive comments, and encourage them to continue the testing, and beyond.
Send them to oggfeedback@bbc.co.uk
Here is what I sent:
Subject: Thank You! Keep it up!
Thank you for testing your streaming with ogg. Myself and hundreds of thousands of unix and unix-like operating system users around the world truly appreciate this.
It's often hard to have faith in large media companies. The BBC has always been the exception in my mind, and here it's shown again.
This is especially useful being in the USA, as it is very difficult to get your radio programming. I'll surely be listening using ogg frequently.
I hope the testing goes well, and ogg streaming becomes a future daily stream.
Good Day
Yes I know its not just unix / unix-like operating systems.
-- Note: If you don't agree with me, don't bother replying. I won't read it.
After a 6 year diet of Radio 1 I have finally found the way..
Dirk
The answer of course is probably obvious; technically superior technology doesn't guarantee success. VHS vs. Betamax. QWERTY vs. Dvorak. Windows vs. Macintosh. By the time VQF came on the scene, MP3 was firmly entrenched in internet culture. VQF never had a chance.
Here's an interesting, naive snippet from the VQF FAQ: While you can find thousands and thousands of MP3s out there, the number of VQFs is comparatively tiny. But this is only a matter of time. Once people begin to realize how incredible these are, their popularity will skyrocket. VQF.com says "Copyright 2000" at the bottom. They've had a year or two to skyrocket. Raise your hands; how many of you have even one VQF on your hard drive?
Now, listen to how familiar this sounds: Though not as popular as an MP3 file yet, Ogg Vorbis will eventually replace the MP3 format by popular demand, and like cassettes and 8 tracks, MP3's will be a thing of the past. This will happen because the Ogg Vorbis file format is a smaller file size, has a higher quality of sound clarity, and is FREE.
I'd like to believe in Ogg, but I've been burned one too many times.
Don't moderators check links??
It a link to goat.sx!
mod it down
The BBC is funded by every household in the UK that owns a TV paying approx 100UKP/year for a TV licence. This licence is required to watch *any* TV, or even to own one, I think. The money goes straight to the BBC. None of it goes to ITV, Channel 4, or any of the channels available on satelite, cable or digital terrestrial.
What do we get for our 100UKP? Well, on the upside, we get quality programming, that I am assured by a BBC advert, is the envy of the world. Not really. What we actually get is 2 channels of mediocre TV. Most of the shows I watch on BBC are American imports, and about two years late at that. 2 channels for 100UKP/year also seems kind of expensive, even for rip-off Britain, considering Sky (the satelite TV company), offers 30 or 40 channels IIRC for that money.
That's not all though. The money splays out sideways, to cover BBC radio, which covers 50% of the FM band, while commercial self-supporting AM stations such as Virgin have been unable to get FM space for 10 years.
We get BBC news 24. it's own progenitor described it as "the news service nobody wanted". It's not quite as good as CNN for news, or Bloomberg for business.
And we get the Perfect Day advert from a few years back. The BBC spent a huge wad of cash recording various artists singing one sentence each of Perfect Day, and then paid to have this played in Cinemas. An advert for a non-commercial service that you have to buy anyway. AMAZING!
Realistically, the BBC's time has come. 50 years ago, it was reasonable to stimulate growth in TV (and fitted in nicely with the more socialist Britain). Now, there are plenty of commercial services that do the same job better, and cheaper. Australia abolished its TV licence many years ago, and America never had one. I think it's about time we join the late-20th century and abolish ours.
Hmm, that came out longer than expected.
not_cub
q='echo "q=$s$q$s;s=$b$s;b=$b$b;$q"';s=\';b=\\;echo "q=$s$q$s;s=$b$s;b=$b$b;$q"
"I should point out that those times that you get cut off for no apparant reason, it's probably me messing. Sorry about that. "
;o)
Hey, that sounds like the way I manage my network
Get your own free personal location tracker
Or should that be the Gruntmeister 6000?
although i am a gpl enthousiast i am also a coompression enthousiast. In that respect realaudio and wma DEFINATELY outperform ogg in ultra low bandwidth circumstances for me (0-64kbps) in their latest incarnations. You cannot honestly say OGG blows them out of the water at those bitrates. A choice between quality and principle for me. What would you choose?
although I only get to watch it late at night on BBC1. Much less annoying than CNN (I used to have cable).
Subject: Thank You! Keep it up!
Thank you for testing your streaming with ogg. Myself and hundreds of thousands of unix and unix-like operating system users around the world truly appreciate this.
We've created a forum at http://www.goatse.cx where hundreds of enthousiasts have already commented. Whay don't you have a look and see what linux user really think?
Good day
The number of people complaining about Ogg having quality problems on Slashdot (without clips or objective blind testing) is inversely proportional to the number of people actually posting clips/blind test results to the Ogg Vorbis mailinglists.
We can't fix problems that don't exist.
--
GCP
I agree, it's a silly sounding name and probably raised the eyebrows of the boss of the BBC engineer that asked permission to stream it. Fortunately he had his boss well training, but I would certainly hesitate to recommend it to my boss for streaming. It sounds niche.
I've asked before and I'll ask again: why not call it "mp5" and encourage people to 'upgrade'? After all, Thompsons got away with MP3 Pro.
Phillip.
Property for sale in Nice, France
Multiply the radio number by 20 and that's the oldest age that you should be listening to that station.
Radio 1: up to 20 years old
Radio 2: up to 40 years old
Radio 3: up to 60 years old
Radio 4: up to 80 years old
Radio 5: Well, does anyone actually listen to radio 5?
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
MRTG stats for the BBCs links.
Thank you for the interest that the majority of you have shown in these trials. The feedback has been invaluable and supportive, with very little of it being just "real sux, ogg rulez!" etc but instead very clear, concise, technical and useful - keep it coming!
:)
:)
Please continue to bear with me as I test different settings or versions of ices/ogg libraries. The high bitrate streams are fine, but I'm trying to get the optimal quality for modem users at the moment. This may not be possible, but I've had a few suggestions which might work. This will mean, as I said in my post to the announce list, that streams may come and go as I try different setups - please be patient
Hopefully soon we will be able to offer these streams on a larger scale going through our content distribution network and available in pop-ups on the homepage, as opposed to the current setup (which seems to be coping remarkably well
Many thanks have to go to the BBC management for letting us continue with these trials - as a few people have noted, the language used on the ogg page suggest we're not management, but techies who have been given the opportunity to play with stuff we think is cool, and hopefully we can eventually persuade people higher up to take this really seriously - after all, it's in our interest as a public broadcaster to do so as we're making our services available to the highest number of users - plus of course, it's free software so we're not limited in what we can do with it.
Thanks! Let the trolling begin..
BBC World Service kicks ass, and "Newshour" and "Talking Point" in particular are almost always very good. I don't understand why you prefer CNN to the BBC. Is the CNN international service better than the BBC domestic service? I can't imagine you watching CNN without feeling like you're getting a load of crap rammed down your throat. From my perspective in the USA, the BBC usually fully understands a news story fully two weeks before CNN can get to Square One on the issue, with the issues of Argentina and Guantanamo Bay being prime examples of this syndrome. You can't possibly be watching the same CNN that is offered to us Americans. Maybe the same concept applies to the BBC.
could be true, but here in the netherlands, we have so much shitty channels, i often watch the BBC. Mostly quality programming, and NO commercials, what do want more? (btw, the dutch channels imports many BBC programs)
Hands up who has more than 1GB of mp3s? How about 5GB? 10GB? 20GB? 50GB?
.ogg format).
.ogg and once in .mp3. All for a little bit more quality? I can tell a 192Kbps from a CD, but damn - it's more than good enough to listen to on the whole.
.ogg taking off the way mp3 has. Nearly everyone has heard of mp3s, in the newspapers, on TV, they know what Napster is, they know how to create and share mp3s.
.ogg is worthwhile - you have just started building your collection of music files from your CD collection, don't have an mp3 player, and have lots of time on your hands. For the average person though, I'd be amazed if they ever hear of .ogg, let alone switch their whole collections over.
I'll bet a lot of you have huge collections of mp3s, and at the least a few gigabytes. Now just think about how long it'd take to rip all your cds again, download the downloaded tracks again (if you can even find them in
Think of the portable, car or hifi mp3 players you invested in that can't play the files, which will mean you'll need to keep every track on your hard drive twice, once in
I can't really see
The inertia behidn MP3 is too big to bring a total change in formats for most people for I'd say around 3-5 years. DVDs have been around for a while now, and STILL most people have a video player, huge amounts of videos are still sold and rented. Probably an unfair comparison - cheap DVD recorders aren't around - but you get the point.
Maybe for some
I think you underestimate the importance of a lack of adverts. The BBC show no adverts. The average American watches 44000 pieces of carefully crafted pieces of corporate propoganda every year, each 30 seconds long. These encourage them to eat more fast food, drive more, consume more, go into debt, and vote for the politicians who are most friendly to corporate interests (the candidate with the most corporate sponsorship can afford the most adverts).
If you watch US television for long, you will start to understand the obesity levels. Sandwitched between 10 minutes worth inane rubbish featuring potentially beautiful but dangerously starved people, you be subjected to 5 minutes of carefully crafted inviting you to go further into debt, then pig out on sugered drinks and ultra high fat junk.
Paying a paltry £100 a year to make a dent in the level of brainwashing we are subjected to is peanuts. The cost is justified by the decreased load on the NHS alone.
Of course, a better solution is to avoid TV altogether. If you must watch TV, at least buy a mirror to put up above the screen. That way you can look up from time to time and compare the excitement on the screen with the futile existence of the vegtable on the couch.
Why would anyone want to go outside, meet people or do things ? Instead, you can watch others have fake adventures or get your opinions and desires programmed in rather than going to all the trouble of figuring them out for yourself. You can achieve a state of lower consciousness - it helps pass the time while you wait for death.
For those too weak to avoid TV altogether (like me), advert free TV is the low-fat/filter-tipped option.
http://rareformnewmedia.com/
Please excuse the slight change of topic - there has been a bit of wierdness on /. about off-topicness recently so i am a little worried about posting this. However, it is still pertinent to the conversation.
;-). Which is a good thing, and seems to be sticking to the original remit of the bbc. They also seem to be doing a good job of raising the british profile abroad, which in an economic sense is a good thing.
;-)
if you're in the US and want 15% less state propaganda in your news.
This is an interesting comment about the British Broadcasting Corporation (a not for profit organisation funded by the british taxpayer). Its primary role is to provide non-biased News, Education and original entertainment to the british populace both home and abroad (through the fantastically cool world service). However, the bbc website throws this role wide open. Plenty of non-british (particularly ossies and usians) now use the website. And they use it for good reasons - its (relatively) non-biased, apoliticol and non-commercial nature. However, these people pay nothing towards the upkeep of the site, unlike british taxpayers like myself.
So, what is the role of the bbc website in a global market? Should they seek avenues for revenue from non-british peoples?
As this thread shows, they seem to be quite good at pushing new technologies and investing/experimenting with the internet (furthermore, news.bbc.co.uk is apache on linux, which is nice
But i cant help feeling a little bitter. Do any other rich countries have any non-commercial websites, up to the standard of the bbc? What I really, really want to do is get my revenge by leeching some taxpayers money back from America or Australia
Give me a break.
Ogg sounds absolutely -fantastic- in comparison to MP3. Have you tried encoding live performances with OGG and MP3? The difference between the two is astounding. The MP3 version sound swishy, like it was recorded inside a washing machine, while the OGG version was almost indistinguishable from the original source.
Can't comment on the "other" formats as I refuse to use them.
Some interesting comments on the BBC and it's licensing model
Erm slash is stripping the link... Try again: Some interesting comments on the BBC and it's licensing model
Does anyone know of a streaming Ogg capable player for MacOS X? I've had trouble finding one in between trying to get Apple to realize they should include Ogg support in iTunes.
I have an Ogg plugin for QuickTime, but I just can't get streaming Ogg to work.
I have a website. It's about Macs.
And now... Radio 4 will explode.
BOOM
Tired of FB/Google censorship? Visit UNCENSORED!
The BBC is funded by every household in the UK that owns a TV paying approx 100UKP/year for a TV licence. This licence is required to watch *any* TV, or even to own one, I think. The money goes straight to the BBC. None of it goes to ITV, Channel 4, or any of the channels available on satelite, cable or digital terrestrial.
Lets see. I moved to Canada from the UK. I pay Can$35 a month to watch telly through my cable provider - thats about UKP180/year. And what do I actually watch? Reruns of British shows mostly, plus the occassional gem like 'Nero Wolfe'. So for that extra 80quid I'm spending I get to watch LESS decent TV. The rest is bunk - there are only so many times I can watch the Buffy reruns (on six channels simultaneously...)
What do we get for our 100UKP? Well, on the upside, we get quality programming, that I am assured by a BBC advert, is the envy of the world.
Guess you haven't lived abroad then. The number of decent productions outside the A&E/BBC productions is pretty small
Not really. What we actually get is 2 channels of mediocre TV. Most of the shows I watch on BBC are American imports, and about two years late at that.
Well I pity you then...
2 channels for 100UKP/year also seems kind of expensive, even for rip-off Britain, considering Sky (the satelite TV company), offers 30 or 40 channels IIRC for that money.
Trust me - even 70+channels of rubbish is still rubbish.
That's not all though. The money splays out sideways, to cover BBC radio, which covers 50% of the FM band, while commercial self-supporting AM stations such as Virgin have been unable to get FM space for 10 years.
So you are complaining that that 100UKP also covers something like 6 national radio stations plus about 50+ local stations, all free of advertising...
We get BBC news 24. it's own progenitor described it as "the news service nobody wanted". It's not quite as good as CNN for news, or Bloomberg for business.
You prefer Chicken Noodle News? Did you find that last lobotomy was good value? CNN has lost the plot bigtime - it fails to find any depth or balance these days and replays the exploding World Trade Towers at the smallest excuse. There is no serious debate on CNN anymore - any kudos they got from having reporters inside Iraq during the Gulf war is long gone...
Now, there are plenty of commercial services that do the same job better, and cheaper. Australia abolished its TV licence many years ago, and America never had one. I think it's about time we join the late-20th century and abolish ours.
If the BBC disappeared, the quality of broadcasting in the UK would quickly look like it does elsewhere - lowest common denominator productions aimed at maximal viewers for minimal cost. Expect massively overrun reruns of cheap programming, budget chat shows, game shows and agro-shows filling up the airwaves. Radio 4 would cease to exist and nothing would replace it - for a commercial radio station relying on ads, there isn't the market. Any in-depth scientific programs would die a death - they are expensive to produce and research. Historical programs would also feel the breath of marketing and fade away.
To be honest, I'd be quite happy to pay UKP40-50/year to access premium web services on the BBC website. It seems you don't realise what value you are getting.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Anything I post is strictly my own thoughts and doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the opinions of IBM.
Both my wife and I have sent the BBC positive, glorious feedback about their OGG streaming. My wife, who isn't even computer literate, says she prefers the OGGS greatly over the Real Audio format.
I'm glad the BBC is listening and is supporting OGG Vorbis. I'm hoping other broadcasters will catch on and ditch the proprietary formats of Windows Media Player and Real Player.
OK I know this is a bit OT, but does anyone know of anything like this for VIDEO?
I'd like to set up a live audio & video stream from the Bushy's Beer Tent (see here for details - not my site design BTW so don't cuss me! :) ), one of the best parts of the Isle of Man's TT festival
(here
for TT-related sites, a simple description of the TT would be that 50,000 bikers or so arrive for 2 weeks for the worlds biggest road
race - an excellent party!), and would be grateful if anyone could point me in
the direction of something that was O-S (and hopefully free) that'd allow me to
do this.
Cheers!
Stef
http://www.beefcake.org.uk/r1/ some kind soul has created a play list for radio 1!!
Your country already leeched off America quite enough thank you. :-)
I somewhat remember something about taxation without representation. I'm not even going to get into the World War's unless of course you liked the idea that you might have been speaking German if it were not for us.
...they were prominent (along with commercial stations) in getting the FCC to back down on its plans for community radio. Their behavior is more similar to Sun's licensing of Java than the FSF's licensing of GNU; they want non-commercial radio to be available, but they want it to be NPR.
> In my opinion, National Public Radio (whose mission is to aid the
> growth and development of noncommercial radio) should definitely be
That indeed is the actual wording of the 1967 Public Broadcasting Act. But NPR, both in the late seventies and late nineties, worked vigorously against just that.
That said, they're pretty liberal on most other issues, and that would fit pretty well with the anticorporate overtones of free software.
"Whatever happened to fair use?"
-- Duff-Man
Yes, but the people they are targetting are not idiots like you. They can easily click on "Download Now" and run the installer.
Will the page behind the "Download Now" link install a free copy of Windows on my machine? If so, let me have some of that $#!+. If not, why is the UK Government granting a de facto duopoly to Microsoft and Apple, both US based companies?
Will I retire or break 10K?
If you are in Linux, then you can use any ripping program you like as long as you use oggenc as the encoder.
Same thing on Windows. Rip to wav, open oggdrop, set the bitrate, and then drag wav files into the window.
Will I retire or break 10K?
But if I want to listen to Oggs on the way to work, I'm screwed.
If you care enough, fund development of an integer-based Vorbis decoder. Because many of the CPUs in portable MP3 players don't handle floating-point arithmetic very well, they use fixed-point math to decode MP3 audio. As soon as the reference Vorbis decoder uses fixed-point instead of floating-point math, the manufacturers will have a much easier time adding Ogg support.
Will I retire or break 10K?
because version numbers are often free marketing.
3 somehow means compressed music.
4 is better than 3 (of course).
It's unfair of you to leave a plainly incorrect barb like that undefended. As a class of license, free software licenses have no anti-corporate overtones and the free software movement does not promote anti-corporate behavior or ethics. That is a myth promulgated by anti-free software advocates and those that don't fully understand the value of the freedom in free software. Free software is available for everyone to improve and share. In fact some licenses listed as free software licenses by the FSF are purposefully not interested in compelling improvements to be shared in a form anyone can run, modify, and redistribute. The existance of these non-copylefted licenses does not imply that copylefted licenses are "anticorporate" (not that being against what a particular corporation does is always bad, either).
The free software movement does not discriminate against corporations. IBM (advertises IBM computers running "Linux"), Apple (whose MacOS X is based on BSD sources, MacOS X comes with some GNU software), Microsoft (whose network stack and ftp CLI program, came from BSD), and others are corporate vendors that choose to use free software. They may not all share the ethic of 'share and share alike', but a lot of companies do use free software.
Digital Citizen
Ever wonder where your sig came from? The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy was originally a Radio 4 programme. I even used to leave the pub early to listen to it live on Saturday nights.