BBC Radio Drops WMA For MPEG-DASH 65
gbjbaanb writes: The BBC has converted its legacy WMA (Windows Media Audio) streams to the "industry-wide and open source" MPEG-DASH format. While this has left some users of old devices unable to receive the broadcasts, the BBC claims the use of WMA was "prohibitively expensive to operate"when existing licence agreements ran out. The BBC says that they are working with "radio industry and manufacturers towards using just one standard."
Yay (Score:5, Insightful)
Yay.
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Re:Yay (Score:5, Informative)
Mpeg-DASH is a streaming technology that is codec-agnostic.
You're talking about it as if it's the same as switching codec, but what you're really saying is akin to "I just don't see the point of using wifi when we have good old fashioned TCP/IP, so unless this "wifi" format can be used everywhere that TCP/IP can be used then I can't see the point of replacing one for another."
Re:Yay (Score:5, Informative)
You're confused. MPEG-Dash is not a codec; it's a container format, and one which enables adaptive quality while streaming, just like WMA does/did.
If you want your MP3/AAC, good news -- you can easily transcode it out of an MPEG-Dash stream.
Re:get-iplayer (Score:5, Informative)
Due to Auntie Beeb's rampant xenophobia, those of you outside of the UK may have to use a proxy or VPN to spoof a UK IP address.
It's not xenophobia, you silly twit. The BBC is funded by UK licence payers, who have no obligation whatsoever to provide free content to people in other countries.
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And more importantly they sell the rights to their content outside the UK and those rights holders expect that their ownership is exclusive.
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I'm sure the French will now finally pay up in order to listen to your glorious BBC.
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I was going to say, "because not everyone has permission to use MP3," but then I realized I first played an MP3 about 19 years ago. The patents just can't have too much longer to go, assuming they haven't already expired.
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In the 90s when music over the internet became a thing, MP3 was the only game in town. MP2 existed, but it was less efficient. At that time there was no such thing as "hardware support" so users were free to pick the most efficient format.
By the early-mid 2000s, there were several formats beating MP3 in listening tests. Musepack, Vorbis, AAC. You don't see many of those "in the wild" now, but I certainly see mo
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If you don't see, it's because you're not looking. iTunes is the #1 music download store, by far, and it's all AAC. Apple does not sell MP3s. Their streaming service, iTunes Radio, also uses AAC. Pandora also uses AAC, not MP3, for its streams.
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You're going to cheer for DASH like that?
Louder.
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Firstly, HTTP is the simplest form of internet delivery â" it is how the vast majority of web sites are delivered. Aligning audio and video delivery with this is much cheaper as it doesnâ(TM)t rely on proprietary streaming formats that require specialist delivery mechanisms. Instead we can make good use of much of the work that has been undertaken in optimising and caching the delivery of HTTP.
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Looking at Dashif.org [dashif.org], I notice the following:
MPEG-DASH Highlighted Features
Advertisements can be inserted as a period between periods or segment between segments in both on-demand and live cases.
I'm a cynic, and I'm getting very suspicious about the suitability to this tech to the BBC.
Re:Bad format in the first place (Score:5, Informative)
MP3 is a compression codec. OGG is a container format. MPEG-DASH is a standard for how to do bitrate-adaptive streaming over HTTP. They're all completely different things.
MPEG-DASH is codec-agnostic, and does not require or imply any specific codec. However, since it's intended for audiovisual streaming (rather than just audio), and since it's done under the auspices of the MPEG, h.264/AAC are the obvious codec pair to choose. There is nothing stopping MPEG-DASH from being used to stream something like VP8/Vorbis or VP9/Opus... and in fact the WebM project has documentation detailing exactly that.
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Thank you. I had to google for more info on MPEG-DASH; kind of surprised to have never heard of it before on Slashdot before today.
Re: Bad format in the first place (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm surprised you expect to hear about it here. Most people here seem to care about the codecs and whether they're free. DASH doesn't really care about codecs and really just defines how you create and use adaptive streams and is based on existing codecs/formats. It only standardised relatively recently and it's going to be big (but hopefully transparent), for example: http://www.dash-player.com/blo... [dash-player.com]. Expect to see it as a vendor neutral alternative to things like MS SmoothStreaming and even Apple's HLS, although the later requires you to have a player with your own decoders if you're sending more than a certain size to iOS devices.
That said, most implementors are doing AVC or HEVC with AAC in a fragmented MP4 container. VOD content is probably one file per stream and live is multiple files fragments) per stream.
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Try Opus @ 64Kbps compared to HE-AAC @ 64Kbps: http://www.opus-codec.org/comparison/
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"AAC is by far the best audio codec that I have come across...Too bad its proprietary"
Proprietary in what way? It's an ISO standard, among other things:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
A.
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It's an iso standard, but what he means is that you need a licence to distribute an AAC encoder/decoder (unless you distribute it as source code I believe).
Patent royalties are incompatible with free SW (Score:3)
Too bad [AAC is] proprietary
Proprietary in what way? It's an ISO standard
Probably "proprietary" as the antonym of "free software" [gnu.org]. ISO standards can be encumbered by patents, and these patents can be licensed under either royalty-free or uniform-royalty terms. AAC and other MPEG codecs tend to carry a uniform royalty, and free software cannot implement any process with a nonzero royalty. Opus, on the other hand, is royalty-free.
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This doesn't even take into account licensing/patent issues, which I believe come into play as well.
What's * not * news (Score:3)
BBC claims the use of WMA was "prohibitively expensive to operate"when existing licence agreements ran out.
ha ha ha ( said with a sarcastic tone )
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Historical hang-up from an MS hire (Score:5, Interesting)
BBC used to have one of the more progressive approaches to media with early mp3 streams, Dirac codec research...it then just stopped. Nice to see them get back towards the rest of the world - next step, please go HTML 5 video on the site as well and then we can avoid Flash.
Why automatically change bitrate (Score:4, Informative)
Why don't they just offer different streams at different bitrates?
Because the user doesn't know in advance which bitrate to choose. For one thing, non-technical users don't know what a bitrate is. For another, the throughput and latency of a particular user's connection to the Internet change over time, and interrupting the stream when the connection quality declines causes a poor user experience.
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Flash is a security nightmare that we recently suggested deserves to rot in an unmarked grave.
No, you'd better mark that grave prominently. Don't want anyone to unearth it again by accident.
Secretive and underhand (Score:5, Informative)
This was really badly publicized. We listen to BBC Radio 3 over the internet in the mornings; our house is situated in a dead zone for over-the-air signals, so we're pretty much stuck with streaming. One morning last week, with no warning, came a repetitive announcement saying that the BBC had discontinued WMA and to "contact your device manufacturer". Our radio is manufactured by Pure, and we have been using Radio 3's direct streaming URL because Radio 3 repeatedly drops off Pure's database for days on end and consequently becomes unavailable. The direct URL, on the other hand, has been very reliable up to now.
The BBC say that they make MP3 streams available for all their channels. I couldn't find one anywhere on any of their websites, so I wrote to them and asked them what it was. Here's what they told me: "We are currently only sharing links to our new streams with aggregators and device manufacturers. We are not currently making the links for the new Shoutcast and HLS streams publicly available. Whilst it was previously our policy to share these we found that we could not assure quality this way.". So not only have they discontinued the old streams, they are deliberately hiding the new ones! This is nonsense. The BBC apparently doesn't want anyone to actually listen to their broadcasts! (I did eventually find a viable MP3 feed from radiofeeds.co.uk).
Now we get to bit rate... It was much ballyhooed a year or so ago that BBC Radio 3 was broadcasting the highest quality classical music available because they supplied a 256 kbps stream. It now seems that the maximum available is 128 kbps. Fine for portable radios, but I really don't think this is step in the right direction.
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You appear to live in the USA. You refer to buying $16.99 USB sticks in recent posts, and you have an e-mail address ending @salk.edu
If so, you'd be doing *very* well to get the BBC's DAB signal from La Jolla, CA...
XiaaLive (Score:1)
This is why BBC Radio 5 Live stopped working using the XiaaLive Android app? Is there a new URL I can use?
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Thanks but that didn't work. I don't live in the UK - maybe that makes a difference?
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They are getting rid of Shoutcast (Score:1)
The problem is not that they are getting rid of wma. The problem is they have dropped acc from Shoutcast and plan to turn off Shoutcast altogether in the next year or so. Since Shoutcast is supported by all Internet radios, and dash is supported by no Internet radios (please let me know if I'm wrong) it means that BBC radio is getting out of the business of streaming to Internet radios, starting by dropping support for Listen Again now, and eventually dropping all support. Too bad. I'd happily buy a rad
Shoutcast (Score:2)
It seems like many internet radio providers are dropping Shoutcast support, usually quietly/silently, and expecting you to use a proprietary app or DRM-based player to access their content. They may as well shoot themselves in the foot.
Dropping Shoutcast support today is akin to commercial radio stations dropping AM in favor of FM back in the 1960's (note: they didn't, some simulcasted but eventually dropped FM until it really took off in the late 70's/early 80's when the penetration of receivers reached c
The details (Score:3)
Based on this post [bbc.co.uk], it looks like the BBC radio audio stream is encoded at a constant rate of 320 kbps using AAC-LC, delivered in the MPEG DASH container, and implemented in HTML5 using Media Source Extensions (MSE).
It is not clear to me if the BBC radio audio is being carried in MPEG DASH as MPEG-4 file format fragments or as an MPEG-2 Transport Stream, but I would suspect for audio-only it is MPEG-4 file format fragments.
Why no commentaries on R5 Live Sport? (Score:2)
The BBC story and blog states that many R5 Live Sports commentaries are 'blanked out' because it is available worldwide and the BBC do not have the world rights. As it is radio, the sound consists mainly of the commentators talking, and these are BBC commentators so in effect the BBC is saying that they do not own the copyright in the words spoken by their employees (intended for broadcast) as part of their employment. Or to put it simply, the BBC own the copyright to the commentaries made by their commenta
Next step.... (Score:1)
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I'm sure they're working on it. They were unhappy with the inability to adequately (from the broadcast rights perspective) protect their content unless they used Flash.
Since Netflix also had this problem until recently, the issue has been solved and I'm sure we'll see the HTML5 player in the not-too-distant future.
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For computers that don't have a H264 hardware decoder (or lack the driver), HTML5 video is even more CPU hungry than flash. So it's a bit early to make that transition I think (or offer both). Why not drop flash in 2017 when Adobe will fully orphan it on linux, then hopefully Firefox will have improved some more in speed. I will then worry about installing a HTML video blocker extension or something to open the video in an external player, till then I'll be happy running the flash player that only quadruple
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Prohibitively expensive! Licenses R a nut-kick (Score:1)