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BBC Radio Drops WMA For MPEG-DASH
gbjbaanb writes: The BBC has converted its legacy WMA (Windows Media Audio) streams to the "industry-wide and open source" MPEG-DASH format. While this has left some users of old devices unable to receive the broadcasts, the BBC claims the use of WMA was "prohibitively expensive to operate"when existing licence agreements ran out. The BBC says that they are working with "radio industry and manufacturers towards using just one standard."
MP3 is a compression codec. OGG is a container format. MPEG-DASH is a standard for how to do bitrate-adaptive streaming over HTTP. They're all completely different things.
MPEG-DASH is codec-agnostic, and does not require or imply any specific codec. However, since it's intended for audiovisual streaming (rather than just audio), and since it's done under the auspices of the MPEG, h.264/AAC are the obvious codec pair to choose. There is nothing stopping MPEG-DASH from being used to stream something like VP8/Vorbis or VP9/Opus... and in fact the WebM project has documentation detailing exactly that.
Mpeg-DASH is a streaming technology that is codec-agnostic.
You're talking about it as if it's the same as switching codec, but what you're really saying is akin to "I just don't see the point of using wifi when we have good old fashioned TCP/IP, so unless this "wifi" format can be used everywhere that TCP/IP can be used then I can't see the point of replacing one for another."
You're confused. MPEG-Dash is not a codec; it's a container format, and one which enables adaptive quality while streaming, just like WMA does/did.
If you want your MP3/AAC, good news -- you can easily transcode it out of an MPEG-Dash stream.
The opinions stated herein do not necessarily represent those of anybody at all. Deal with it.
This was really badly publicized. We listen to BBC Radio 3 over the internet in the mornings; our house is situated in a dead zone for over-the-air signals, so we're pretty much stuck with streaming. One morning last week, with no warning, came a repetitive announcement saying that the BBC had discontinued WMA and to "contact your device manufacturer". Our radio is manufactured by Pure, and we have been using Radio 3's direct streaming URL because Radio 3 repeatedly drops off Pure's database for days on end and consequently becomes unavailable. The direct URL, on the other hand, has been very reliable up to now.
The BBC say that they make MP3 streams available for all their channels. I couldn't find one anywhere on any of their websites, so I wrote to them and asked them what it was. Here's what they told me: "We are currently only sharing links to our new streams with aggregators and device manufacturers. We are not currently making the links for the new Shoutcast and HLS streams publicly available. Whilst it was previously our policy to share these we found that we could not assure quality this way.". So not only have they discontinued the old streams, they are deliberately hiding the new ones! This is nonsense. The BBC apparently doesn't want anyone to actually listen to their broadcasts! (I did eventually find a viable MP3 feed from radiofeeds.co.uk).
Now we get to bit rate... It was much ballyhooed a year or so ago that BBC Radio 3 was broadcasting the highest quality classical music available because they supplied a 256 kbps stream. It now seems that the maximum available is 128 kbps. Fine for portable radios, but I really don't think this is step in the right direction.
Due to Auntie Beeb's rampant xenophobia, those of you outside of the UK may have to use a proxy or VPN to spoof a UK IP address.
It's not xenophobia, you silly twit. The BBC is funded by UK licence payers, who have no obligation whatsoever to provide free content to people in other countries.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Why don't they just offer different streams at different bitrates?
Because the user doesn't know in advance which bitrate to choose. For one thing, non-technical users don't know what a bitrate is. For another, the throughput and latency of a particular user's connection to the Internet change over time, and interrupting the stream when the connection quality declines causes a poor user experience.