Radio OH 4

Are you sitting comfortably?

Then I'll begin ....

There are not many factors that might force a return back to England.But what might come closest would be an embargo on the ability to listen to BBC Radio 4 recognised by most thinking people as a welcome addition to ones life.

In the old days the BBC listen again facility was driven by a selective set of Realplayer links but these days everything has migrated to the BBC multimedia iPlayer

For alleged copyright reasons only people living in the UK have access to the full range of facilities, us ex pats abroad must make do with just the radio channels, which thankfully includes Radio4.

At work however we are not allowed to stream audio so what are the options

Option 1: Podcast

This is by far the easiest option.

• Goto the BBC Podcast Directory
  
  



• Click on the relevant button to subscribe

Option 2: Stream Real Audio Stream to Disk, transcode and copy to MP3 player

Clearly only use this option when a Podcast is not available since it is not at all convenient! Although one could perhaps automate the process.

Here is the prep work (assumes a MS Windows platform and this has been tested under Windows Vista 32 Business, Windows Vista 64, Windows Server 2008 64 bit)

• If you have Realplayer installed, uninstall it (the alternative software plays real audio files, however if for some masochistic reason you want to keep the Genuine Realplayer stop right now, this procedure wont work!)


• Install instead The Real Alternative, this comes with Media Player classic, you are going to need that


• Install the Open Source mplayer program


• Install a program to convert a .WAV file to .MP3 (I use LAME with a graphical front end called Razorlame)
  

Okay now we are ready for an example

• Select the show you want, in my example BBC Radio4 Sunday Worship


• Get to the iPlayer screen and select at bottom Dial-up modem version: ON


• Click on the R Realplayer logo to play this using Realplayer, thus starting Media Player classic

• Pause the audio stream


• Look at File, Properties, Clip Properties

• Now figure out the real URL of the broadcast == location + begining of filename before the question mark i.e in the above example

rtsp://rmv8.bbc.net.uk:554/radio4/0810_sun.ra

• Close Classic media player and from a Command line start mplayer and stream the audio to a .WAV file

mplayer -ao pcm:file=20081023.worship.wav rtsp://rmv8.bbc.net.uk:554/radio/0810_sun.ra

• Now take the WAV file and use RazorLame to convert it to an .mp3

• Now add this .mp3 file to your Audio player for listening

See, that was easy wasn't it!