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United Kingdom Media

BBC Radio Drops WMA For MPEG-DASH 65

Posted by Soulskill from the changing-horses dept.
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."
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BBC Radio Drops WMA For MPEG-DASH More

BBC Radio Drops WMA For MPEG-DASH

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  • Yay (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Art3x ( 973401 ) on Wednesday February 18, 2015 @02:20AM (#49078547)

    Yay.

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by account_deleted ( 4530225 )
      Comment removed based on user account deletion

      • Re:Yay (Score:5, Informative)

        by jo_ham ( 604554 ) <joham999 AT gmail DOT com> on Wednesday February 18, 2015 @04:27AM (#49078839)

        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)

        by Sneftel ( 15416 ) on Wednesday February 18, 2015 @04:28AM (#49078845)

        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.

      • Why not good old fashioned MP3 which is playable anywhere on anything?

        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.

      • There never really was a "format war" as far as codecs go. Or if there is a war, it's ongoing.

        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

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by extra88 ( 1003 )

          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.

          • I'm well aware of iTunes, I actually use its AAC encoder on a regular basis. By "in the wild" I mean music that get distributed person-to-person, like on torrent sites. Where the uploader has a choice of formats to use. Not Apple's walled garden. My suspicion is that a good deal of AAC uploads you see on torrent sites do in fact originate from iTunes, and that we'd see a lot more of them if it weren't for things like Apple embedding your username in the file. I'm actually not sure if they still do that, but

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Cloud K ( 125581 )

      You're going to cheer for DASH like that?

      Louder.

  • What's * not * news (Score:3)

    by invictusvoyd ( 3546069 ) on Wednesday February 18, 2015 @02:53AM (#49078603)

    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 )

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by dhaen ( 892570 )
      Of note is that wma clients represent less than 5% of their audience, and presumably is a diminishing percentage. That's what makes replacing the equipment and licenses expensive.
    • Interestingly, one can't find any mention of licensing agreements in the two BBC blogs - they only say that " it (supporting WMA) requires special infrastructure to serve it and the industry is moving away from providing it as an option."

  • Historical hang-up from an MS hire (Score:5, Interesting)

    by mccalli ( 323026 ) on Wednesday February 18, 2015 @03:00AM (#49078613) Homepage
    Missing from most of the articles on this, including the ones on their web site, is that they used to employ a senior Microsoft media guy who, unsurprisingly, set about converting everything to Microsoft Media formats - Ashley Highfield. Here's a 2007 article [digital-lifestyles.info] with a section of the controversy

    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.

  • Secretive and underhand (Score:5, Informative)

    by davidc ( 91400 ) <cdpuff&gmail,com> on Wednesday February 18, 2015 @09:12AM (#49079005)

    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.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      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...

  • This is why BBC Radio 5 Live stopped working using the XiaaLive Android app? Is there a new URL I can use?

  • They are getting rid of Shoutcast (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    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

  • 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)

    by TheSync ( 5291 ) on Wednesday February 18, 2015 @01:50PM (#49080885) Journal

    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.

  • 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

  • Now BBC.co.uk and bbc.com need to drop Flash video for HTML5.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by jo_ham ( 604554 )

      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.

    • 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

  • Prohibitively expensive> Not for (one of) the most monopolistic and richest companies in the USA. Thank you BBC for telling MS to shove their license up it. BTW who is ready to pay a yearly license for win10? I'd rather use win98SE with all those cracked free programs remember how great they were? And how those "free programs" made MS a predominant computer OS. Then they had to make WINXP DRM crappy and nothing you had or bought like musical keyboards from creative worked. That is unless you bought

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