[Preston] BBC Radio Listen Again website and Realplay

[Guy Heatley]

I haven't had much experience with real audio, but a student at Uni was
telling a tale about using Lynx (or Links), the text based browser, to
access sites that have these media formats. Apparently these text based
browsers will allow you to simply download these files without trying to
inflict some external program on you.
I haven't tested this claim, by the way.
-- 
Guy

> '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>
>
>
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