New Hitchhiker's Episodes Available Online

Michael Sheldon writes "The BBC is now offering the first of the new Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy radio episodes as either Real or WMP audio streams. Meaning listeners abroad can now hear the new series, which started playing on UK radio last Tuesday."

Comments

RA and WMA?

[moonbender]

Shame that they don't offer either MP3 or OGG versions of the show. Wonder why they decided against using them, especially considering that the BBC has some experience with OGG - they used to have some live radio streams running it.

Re:RA and WMA?

[SpooForBrains]

They were working on broadcasting it on the Sub Ether Waveband but they didn't have the necessary rights.

Re:RA and WMA?

[jonwil]

I suspect part of it is not wanting it in a format that can be saved to disk and kept for later (otherwise it would hurt sales when the thing is released on CD or whatever)

Re:RA and WMA?

[Alranor]

So i'm guessing they've never heard of mplayer -dumpstream before then.

Ah well, never mind eh.

Re:RA and WMA?

[Malc]

Experience with OGG? They haven't touched it for nearly two years!

Personally I'm disappointed they didn't also offer it in FLAC, PCM, DTS, SDDS and Dolby Digital! Give it a rest, stop whining, and be happy that they made it available in the first place. It seems people get moderated up just for whinging about OGG. And no, I'm not new here ;)

Re:RA and WMA?

[Ford Prefect]

Sure, just check your copy of the Guide.

Okay then...

BEEPcrkcrkcrk-BEEPcrkcrkcrk-KRCKaKRCK-BORP!

What to do if you find yourself with a computer that's unable to play Realaudio, and you're at your wits' end with no hope of HHGTTG:

Consider how lucky you are that life has been good to you so far.

Alternatively, if life hasn't been good to you so far, which, given your current circumstances is more likely:

Consider how lucky you are that it won't be troubling you much longer.

Grr. Pile of rubbish.

Re:RA and WMA?

[dasmegabyte]

Yeah, moderation is very simple. Somebody agrees with you, +1, Insightful even if it's the same, tired, flawed opinion that's been posted for years. Somebody disagrees with you, -1 Troll even if it's new, perceptive and well argued.

For example, you got a +5 for pointing out the same, tired argument that some people whine about OGG and get moderated for it. I will get modded -1 Troll, because of my vitriolic .sig.

You know what? Fuck Slashdot. I'm going to start reading Fark, which is just as retarded but shows me boobies.

Re:RA and WMA?

[Colonel Cholling]

not very much a fan of fantasy

And I, and probably most slashdot readers, am not very much a fan of people who can't distinguish between science fiction and fantasy. (Failure to distinguish between science fiction and real life is, sometimes, forgivable.) I thus offer the following quick guide:

If a story is set in some vague time period that can't figure out whether it's ancient Rome, the Middle Ages, or the Renaissance, and features wizards and lots of square-chinned guys with poor hygeine and names like Glorn Thundertrousers, it's probably fantasy.

If a story features spaceships, robots, time travel, lots of made-up technobabble, a high-school knowledge of physics, and lots of people in Spandex jumpsuits who are either green or have multiple heads, and have names that look like the result of a random banging on a keyboard, it's probably sci-fi.

If a story just has columns of abbreviations and numbers and words like "liquidity" and "divestiture," you're reading the financial reports by mistake.

KCRW has original series

[Anonymous Coward]

FYI, Primary and Secondary Phase's are available from KCRW in Real format:

http://kcrw.org/show/hg

FFS!

[Anonymous Coward]

Look you don't have to wait for the BBC put *PUT THEM ONLINE* to listen from abroad. You can listen to Radio 4 *LIVE* via streaming (HHGTTG is on Tuesdays at 6pm UK time)... this story relates to the BBC's "Listen Again" feature which allows to to catch it if you miss it.

Re:FFS!

[Anonymous Coward]

Yup, I listened to the first episode on Tuesday here in Wisconsin, live.

But a minor correction: it is actually on Tuesdays at 6:30 PM their time. That is 12:30 PM my time (central), so that is 1:30 PM Eastern, 11:30 AM Mountain, and 10:30 AM Pacific. Every Tuesday for the next five weeks.

The first new episode was really quite impressive, and brought back a flood of memories from when I'd last read the books 15 or so years ago.

There's isn't a 42 joke in here, I swear!

[Aquatopia17]

I for one am really excited that HG2G has finally made its way back to radio. And on top of that, I can listen to it hassle-free (not as in beer) and free (as in beer) of charge over the internet. I wish listening to American proprietary radio stations was always this easy.

Re:There's isn't a 42 joke in here, I swear!

[ninthwave]

The BBC isn't propietery it is paid for by a license fee which is charged to all owners of Tv's and radios like a tax. They have to be as free as possible as it has been paid for by the UK citizens already.

Re:There's isn't a 42 joke in here, I swear!

[LordK2002]

I wish listening to American proprietary radio stations was always this easy.

Really? I would prefer it if listening to American proprietary radio stations were made as difficult as possible.

Reason for no OGG / MP3

[tod_miller]

There are still copyrights, but more so they want to pull people into thier sprawl of a site.

I love the radio shows. I have them as MP3 (must OGG 'em)

Any updates on the film? It is a long way off, I don't wanna rush them, but they can keep us in suspense, and trickle delicious sweet information to us slowly - and an OGG of marvin saying 'diodes on my left side'.

In unrelated 42 news, Seinfeld 1-3 series set was 42 on the amazon sales rank, and I bought it today. Nov i'll be out.

Purchase on MP3 from bbcshop

[tod_miller]

Errm... Here...

Or *mule*, gnu*, *azaa it. torrent to mp3's greatly appreciated, all proceeds go to my HDD.

Re:Where can I get the originals?

[SpooForBrains]

Here. The audio effects make up a large part of the experience, so buying the CD is highly recommended.

Re:So..

[moonbender]

One way that usually works is to set your sound config up to record "What You Hear". Kind of like the analogue gap, except it never becomes analogue and leaves your computer. ;) Of course, that'll only get you uncompressed PCM files and, when re-compressed, artifacts, but I doubt there's anything else you can do.

mplayer to the rescue!

[CoolVibe]

$ mplayer -dumpstream mms://wm.bbc.co.uk/radio4/hitchhikers/h2g3_episode 1.asf &

Share and enjoy, and why don't you stick your head in a pig ;)

Re:mplayer to the rescue!

[CoolVibe]

grmbl, damn slashdot. Watch out when copy&pasting that, there is a stray space in there courtesy of slashcode.

Re:mplayer to the rescue!

[gyrojoe]

If you want to encode it to something else, convert it to wav like this:

$ mplayer stream.dump -ao pcm

Convert the resulting wav file to MP3 (or OGG) and you're done.

Re:mplayer to the rescue!

[Hieronymus Howard]

Gentoo users will require mplayer to be compiled with the new (and undocumented) network flag in their USE flags, otherwise streaming will not work.

Re:So..

[Excors]

I've been using the shareware version of NetTransport, which seems to work quite nicely - give it the .ram or .asx URL, wait half an hour, and it'll save the 26MB of .rm or .asf data.

HHGTTG Text Adventure

[stephendl]

Even better on the site is a flash version of the original HHGTTG text adventure game...

http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/hitchhikers/game.shtml

Re:HHGTTG Text Adventure

[Ford Prefect]

Dear moderators,

The above post actually comes just after my post on the subject, not before. 'Stephendl' obviously copied mine, only for it to be swept back through an eddy in the space-time continuum. Please moderate accordingly.

(Apologies!)

Updated Infocom Game

[Ford Prefect]

As trailed a few weeks ago, there's the updated version of the old Infocom interactive fiction version of the Guide.

I had a play on it yesterday - I've no idea how they built it, but they seem to have some unholy alliance of Flash, Z-code and XML running it all. It's pretty cool, too - it's the same old game, but with added graphics...

Re:Updated Infocom Game

[Sean D. Solle]

... some unholy alliance of Flash, Z-code and XML

The back end's a C++ multi-threaded ZMachine running as a web server extension (can be compiled either as an Apache module or an ISAPI DLL).

As well as sending the user's input and the game's output back and forth as XML, it also watches the ZMachine's internal state to send the location, score, number of moves, inventory etc.

It has extra "knowledge" about the HHG game's internals (which is how it can handle the bedroom being dark, house being knocked down etc). This was hard-coded in the release that the BBC are running (due to time constraints - we had to ship on Sep 21st!), but newer builds have an external config file which can let the game twiddle the XML output accordingly, so in theory it could run any of the Infocom adventures.

Shim's Flash client grabs the XML, pulls up Rod's artwork, displays the inventory and handles the text i/o history.

Most of the team is on vacation at the moment (I'm posting in the naive hope that it'll mean less email waiting for me when I get back ;-), but there'll be full spec released in due course.

It's pretty cool, too

Thanks ... glad you like it!

Sean.

net transport

[Errtu76]

You can save streaming media using Net Transport

Re:net transport

[slackerboy]

From their website:
"Net Transport is the faster, terrible (very many users call from feedback) and most powerful downloading tool that you ever saw"

I'm still trying to figure out if that's a glowing recommendation or not....

Eddies in the space-time continuum...

[Serious Simon]

Who's Eddy?

Re:Eddies in the space-time continuum...

[AndroidCat]

Hi there! I'm Eddy, your shipboard computer!

I'm sorry I am tooo depressed.....

[adsl]

...to listen to a radio programme. I think I will go and dismantle myself. Love Marvin:(

Re:Where can I get the originals?

[kraut]

You can get a slightly cheaper version from http://www.bbcshop.com