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Canadian Public Radio Streaming Ogg Vorbis
d00dman writes "CBC Radio, Canada's major national public broadcaster is now streaming in ogg/vorbis. Recently CBC had switched from realmedia streams to windows media streams for their radio broadcasts. After receiving a plethora of complaints, suggesting ogg/vorbis as an alternative, CBC has begun a test ogg stream of the toronto stations. They boast in their ogg FAQ that they're encoding with oddcast and streaming with icecast."
That a publicly funded organization is actually trying to cut costs. Too bad it doesn't happen more often.
Now, if that makes sense to anyone, could you please explain it to me? I think I've confused myself.
Sounds very forward-thinking. I will definitely be listening to this stream when I move there soon.
What a bunch of standards-following wimps Canadians are. Join Kyoto protocol. Join international world court. Use the same ballot across the nation. (Count that ballot in hours.) Same-sex marriage. Soon-to-be-legal marijuana. Free health care. Soon to be free daycare. What a crew. Oh, and some Ogg Vorbis thingee now, too.
hopefully the cbc will completely change over to Ogg format. Its difficult for older computers (like the one my parents have) to play media cleanly through Windowsmediaplayer as its a resorce hog, and if they want to do anyhting else while listening it gets choppy.
Cool, now it's up there with the classical station WCPE!
Does anyone know of any other Ogg Vorbis streams? The only other one I know is a police scanner.
Happy about this?
From CBC's Ogg FAQ:
We're currently testing the streaming of Ogg Vorbis, an open, free audio codec. Please contact CBC Audience Relations if you have suggestions or comments.
Virgin Radio have already been streaming Ogg Vorbis for ages, they even have a 160k stream: http://www.virginradio.co.uk/thestation/listen/
People in Canada always harp on the CBC because it receives public funding, but it really is the best news organization in the country and to top it off they actually innovate. They had a decent website back in 1998 (the earliest Wayback is from '99). They stream CBC radio and all of their TV news broadcasts for free, in multiple codecs. And if you want local news that isn't about a dog or a whale they might be your only option. Bravo CBC. They can take it from my cold, dead hands.
In Soviet America the banks rob you!
Despite the parent article stating there were a plethora of complaints when the CBC switch from Real Media streams to windows media, they do, in fact, provide information on their site for unix users to access these streams.
For the ogg streams, they only provide access to the stations in Toronto, rather than the local stations.
Whichever format, though, I'm happy that I can listen to the CBC on the operating system of my choice. However, I think it is appropriate that a public service broadcaster use a format that is unencumbered and hence accessible to all.
Basically, you need .m3u (audio/x-mpegurl) mapped to a player that can handle Ogg, most often Winamp.
The main problem with Ogg as a "general public" format (as opposed to a "private collection" format) is that the general public still isn't ogg'ed -- but that matters less with a private collection.
Here's what I do: Bitty Browser & Andromeda
As a CBC Radio listener for the better part of 40 years I can tell you this is just another innovative step in the history of a great public institution. CBC is also known for its great honest and open minded coverage of news. This has been very apparent in the last couple of decades as comercial private media has been gobbled up by massive multinational corporations and given a sanitized, unified, and politically correct editorial viewpoint (according to the disposition of the owners and not always the accuracy of the facts). But possibly best of all the CBC works to inform, educate, motivate its listeners with open and honest coverage of world events... presented from multiple points of view.
If anyone would like to hear what the rest of the world is thinking and doing, catch the news and editorials on CBC... By the way, BBC radio does this too.
At the start of September the CBC switched exclusively to Windows Media 9. I fired off a few e-mails to hosts I'd corresponded with before, and to their news desk. I noted they were denying "universal access" to their internet radio (that's a good push-button word in Canada) because the latest codecs were not supported by Linux/Unix based media players. I strongly suspect I wasn't the only one, since it only took about a week for them to switch to WM7/MS-MPEG4 for their streams, which Xine and Mplayer seem to handle more reliably.
On one of their promo-spots before the news they even explicitly said "even linux users" could listen on their internet streams. :-)
The switch to testing Ogg was a little later, which runs against their stated "one-stream" policy. I also strongly suspect Akamai was behind the original switch. Akamai streams the CBC content and are a "Microsoft Partner" company in the venture. It sounds a bit to me like Akamai sold them a bill of goods in the name of cost cutting, and that the response was not what they expected. I'm quite sure listeners in Europe, where MS does not reign quite as supreme, were not pleased. I've had notes from friends over there asking how to stream WM7 on Linux.
Then, three weeks ago, I submitted this story. (...but I'm not bitter...) :^)
The CBC is not only great radio and television, it's also an organization full of really nice, really smart folks, and has been voted in the top 100 places to work in Canada.