[Klug-general] OpenOB

[Chris Roberts]

Hi KLUGgers,

I'd like to draw your attention to a project which might be of use to those
who deal with getting audio from one place to another over a network -e.g.
radio stations.

Normally one would gave to fork out a fair bit of dosh for a box specially
designed for this task - or software similarly so. Price is normally
dependant on quality . Low budget operations like community or student
radio can't afford codecs with any reasonable broadcast quality.

OpenOB changes that. You can run it on any linux box capable of running
gstreamer and python (including arm SBCs) and any audio interface that
supports (via alsa, Jack, pulse). It also supports Opus - a high
quality,low bitrate, low latency, open source codec.

It has significant advantages over say vlc, in that it is designed for
broadcast use - and will automatically recover from network outages. Not to
mention being significantly easier to configure and run, and with Jack
support.

https://github.com/JamesHarrison/openob

At the moment I and several others are working on making it work well on
the Raspberry Pi platform, so you could build a IP codec in hardware for
around £60 - about £200 less than its cheapest alternative .

It already works well on the Beagleboard xM with a USB sound card.

I'm going to be using it in anger this weekend at Lounge on the farm
festival in Canterbury this weekend - for CSR FM's coverage of the event (
www.csrfm.com).

If you're interested there are instructions on how to install it on the
github page, and a link to the users mailing list.

If you have a RPi with a USB sound card and you fancy hacking at it,
there's a discussion on the mailing list about it at the moment.

Cheers all!
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