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."

Comments

Re:OGG's niche

[crandall]

Perhaps on classical music it is worse, but I find that with heavy electronic music (Aphex Twin, Autechre, Squarepusher, etc), that OGG keeps the music much clearer than MP3. MP3 tends to mutilate hard core electronic music. OGG on the otherhand manages to produce better quality at a lower bitrate than MP3.

For Aphex Twin, I tend to find that unless the MP3 is 256kb or greater, I can hear the MP3 warbling. With OGG, 192 is enough that I can't distinguish from CD anymore.

Basically I've moved to OGG completely. I rip everything to OGG, and rarely use mp3s anymore. Since there is an official OGG plugin for winamp (Download Here), it's easy to just use OGG instead.

Re:Radio 1 vs Radio 4

[Malc]

R1-4 are national radio stations. Unlike NPR which consists of a lot of locally broadcast content (from what I recall I experienced when I lived in the US), BBC radio is the same everywhere, with a little local content. I was in the highlands of Scotland last summer, and all heard on R1 was continuous coverage of the lead up to the England-Germany world cup qualification match... hardly a word about Scotland-Croatia. The cool thing about national broadcasting is when you're driving around: as you go out of range of the transmitter, most modern car radios re-tune themselves to the new frequency and you don't get any interruptions!

R4 is probably the closest to NPR, from the perspective a British person in the UK. The World Service would probably be closer for an American listening in from overseas. As a British ex-pat, I like to listen to the World Service. The quality is generally very good with no advertising, nor any annoying fund-raising drives.

I've made a big assumption that you're American. Apologies if you're not. It might make sense to many other N.American readers though.

Re:HowTo record?

[x3ja]

If you listen to the stream in XMMS, you can set option "Save to Disk" in the options for the Ogg Vorbis input plugin.

Thanks for the interest

[Jonathan Perkin]

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..

Midly offtopic

[Marcus Brody]

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.

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 ;-). 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.

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 ;-)