"Light bulb"

[Vincent Trouilliez]

On Fri, 2005-07-08 at 19:29 -0700, Daniel Robitaille wrote:
> Have you try podcasting?  

Never heard of it. Not to worry though, as I am usually the last one on
earth to aware of things. I ought to go out more I guess...


> That makes them a lot easier to listen to using 
> existing applications in Ubuntu. (rhythmbox + gstreamer0.8-mad and you
> are set). 

Hmmm, yes. There are 3 main/general purpose national radios in Frog land
(the only ones that also broadcast on long waves)
To my amazement, "Europe1", which is targets the youngest audience of
the 3 (youngest, not young) is also the one that uses crappy old
fashioned real player and windows media player format plugins either for
streaming the live shows, or the archives.
OTOH, the "Radio-France" group, which produces France-Inter, is the one
with the "oldest" image, bit old fashioned, has been and all that. BUT,
in fact they are actually MUCH more modern than the others, because when
you look at this page of their site: 

http://www.radiofrance.fr/services/aide/difflive.php

You can see that they not only mention Linux, write a note about
open&closed source format, but also provide OGG streams for all (8) of
their radio stations ! That's what I call modern and forward thinking.

As you said, it is soooo sweet, you can just copy/paste the url into
Rhythmbox, and you can listen to any of these 8 radios as easily and
conveniently as you would listen to a music file ! 
Sadly, the quality of the sound is a lot poorer than what comes out of
my FM radio receiver when listening to the corresponding stations. So I
was very disappointed and gave up.
I did send an e-mail to Radio-France about it, asking their tech guy to
increase the quality of the sound to match what they air on FM radio,
but I never got a reply. :-/
It's a shame, because in France now everybody has at least 1Mbps
internet access, with many of them now getting 8 or 20Mbps (depending on
the ISP), and the bandwidth on FM radios is not very wide (can't
remember how many KHz though, must dig out my old school books...), so I
am sure that they could stream radios with excellent sound quality and
still let plenty of bandwidth to the user for surfing, downloading,
e-mail etc.
At lest, they could give the choice between a top quality OGG stream for
broadband, and the current crap quality, for dial-up or ISDN.

So the sooner Ubuntu and open source rules the world, the sooner OGG
will replace  'Real' and 'Windows Media' streams, to give us a perfect
on-line radio experience...

So this Ubuntu foundation is very welcome, it will help us get there
faster :o)


--
Vince