[Preston] BBC Radio Listen Again website and Realplay

[Matthew T. Atkinson]

'ellow,

The problem you're probably coming up against is the same one I did --
the URL that is linked to by the BBC Radio player is /not/ the URL of
the actual media.  Better to give an example than to explain, I think. 
Here is what I had to do to get the URL for Bob Harris' Saturday show on
Radio 2...

1. Went to the BBC Radio 2/Bob Harris Saturday show web site and found
the ``listen again'' link.

2. Middle-clicked on it to open it in a new tab.

3. Did a ``view source'' on the tab.

4. Found the part where it links to the Real media (by searching for
``rpm'').  In my case this was quite a way down and the line read:

document.write('<embed
src="http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio/aod/rpms/bobharris.rpm"
type="audio/x-pn-realaudio-plugin"
pluginspage="http://www.real.com/products/player/bbc.html" width="0"
height="0" name="RP" autostart="true" console="one" />');

5. Downloaded this RPM file with wget, i.e.:

wget http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio/aod/rpms/bobharris.rpm

This is *not* the real media file -- it is just a pointer to it.

6. Then I ``cat''ed the RPM file and got this:

matatk at obsidian:~$ cat bobharris.rpm
rtsp://rmv8.bbc.net.uk/radio2/bobharris.ra?start="44"matatk@obsidian:~$

7. Finally:

mplayer rtsp://rmv8.bbc.net.uk/radio2/bobharris.ra

Not that I would ever do the following (lol) but if you want to keep a
record of the stream then you can use:

mplayer -dumpstream rtsp://rmv8.bbc.net.uk/radio2/bobharris.ra

But you wouldn't do such an illegal thing, would you? ;-)

(Personally, I buy all the music I like on CD but I have no problem with
listening to the radio version a few times before I decide it is worth
it -- the quality (or lack of it) is such that you feel compelled to buy
the CD anyway, I find.)

I hope this helps you out.  The steps should be the same for any BBC
Radio player.  Possibly other such ones on the 'net too.

bye just now,


P.S. You may need to use mplayer -forceidx to play the stream back with
seek support (i.e. to allow you to use the arrow keys to fast fwd/rewind
it).  I was not able to work out how to use mencoder to rebuild the
index so I have to use the -forceidx option every time.
-- 
Matthew T. Atkinson <matthew at agrip.org.uk>