[Wolves] Pete's response to Linux Format

[Adam Sweet]

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Dave Morley wrote:
> On Wed, 2007-12-12 at 11:06 +0000, Kevanf1 wrote:
>> This may sound like a silly question but I genuinely don't know.  Is
>> it possible to listen to a podcast on a PC?  My son (Christopher) has
>> a iPod - 80gb job - but I don't as I rarely listen to music these days
>> except occasionally on the PC.
> Yes both rhythmbox and amorok have options to download podcasts and then
> you select and play.

Just in case it wasn't obvious, you don't have to use an application to
download them for you either. As someone else in the thread said, a
podcast is normally just and MP3 file or an Ogg Vorbis file. You can
download it manually and play it back in whatever media player you have.

Alternatively, you can do what other people are suggesting and use
something like Rhythmbox or Amarok to subscribe to the podcast's RSS
feed and it will automatically download the podcast for you when there
is a new one.

In case you didn't know, Ogg is a family of audio and video codecs which
are patent free, unlike MP3 and AAC etc. By using most codecs under
Linux, you are either violating the codec's license, or you have paid
for a license (such as by paying for the Fluendo codecs or copying your
Windows codecs over to your Linux partition). For patented codecs,
somebody must have paid for a license at some point, the cost of the
license fee for the bundled codecs, compression and encryption
algorithms in Apple and Microsoft's products are included in your
payment for their product. Linux, being cost free in most cases, can't
do this as there is nobody to pay the license fee, which is why most
distributions don't ship MP3 support by default, they have to place that
legal decision in your hands.

Ogg Vorbis is the audio codec and offers better sound quality for file
size than MP3 and is also unpatented. Ogg Theora is a video codec and is
too orangey for crows (LugRadio joke), there are also other Ogg codecs
but these are the most well known ones. I think most Linux distributions
consequently default to using Ogg Vorbis for audio encoding and Theora
for video encoding and most video generated by the Free/Open Source
software community is produced in Theora format (I'm thinking of Linux
Conf Australia here, I have about 500MB of the stuff on my desktop
waiting to be watched).

Neither of these are supported natively on Windows or Apple's OS X,
iTunes and iPods, you can probably work out why yourselves. You can add
support by installing VLC on both OSes. Most hardware audio players, be
they iPods, Zunes, Creative whatevers or Sony MP3 walkmans (walkmen?)
support Vorbis as they normally use a hardware decoder chip which does
all the hard work, decoding isn't normally done in software on such
devices as they are low powered, both in volts and and in MHz. There
aren't as many chips which support Vorbis compared to the well-known
codecs and so Vorbis isn't a compatibility choice, but some devices have
Ogg support and have a dedicated following as a result.

The iRiver, I believe, used to support Ogg but don't any more. On Peter
Oliver's recommendation, I own a Cowon iAudio X5 and I love it. Ogg on
the move for me. It also plays video, albeit not Theora I don't think.
Cowon also provide no-DRM firmware which is an incredible bonus.

Christian Schaller, formerly of Fluendo, the company that develop the
GStreamer multimedia framework which most distributions use, also
claimed that most generic portable audio players, all of those kind of
unbranded devices from China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore, South Korea
and so on, support Vorbis, though most of us though this was optimistic
at best. There is a list of devices that support vorbis at:

http://wiki.xiph.org/index.php/PortablePlayers

LugRadio offers high and low quality downloads in Ogg Vorbis and MP3
format so you can take your choice as to what suits you best.

That's enough now, I only meant to say that you don't have to fiddle
with subscribing to RSS feeds in media player, explain what Ogg is and
make you all use it where you are able.

Regards,

Adam Sweet

- --

http://blog.adamsweet.org/

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