Capturing an rstp, mms or ogg audio stream and coverting to MP3

[Eric Dunbar]

Hello all: I have a challenge for you.

I'd like to download streams of OGG and RealPlayer from a radio
station, convert them to MP3 or AAC (if I get an iPod shuffle), and
play them back on an MP3 player at my leisure.

<preamble>
The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) is the public Canadian TV
and radio broadcaster that is an analogue to BBC in the UK or NPR in
the US.

I'd like to listen to some of the programs made by the CBC at my
leisure on an MP3 player. Unfortunately, CBC doesn't exactly get how
MP3s could be *increase* listener numbers and expand audiences,
especially amonst the (mostly) younger iPod-toting crowd (this is the
demographic they are having trouble reaching) and the CBC has only
taken baby steps in getting their audio content on-line.

To their credit, do provide archives for some of the programs (for
which they own copyright) on-line in streamed RealPlayer format (e.g.
<rtsp://media.cbc.ca/cbc.ca/thehouse/media/latest-thehouse.rm>), and,
they also provide live feeds in Windows Media Player format and now
have an experiment going with live streamed OGG (see
<http://www.cbc.ca/listen/ogg.html>).

(I'm still fuming that they dropped QuickTime format supported by
iTunes and went with the vastly inferior WMP but that's a different
story)
</preamble>

So, in a nut-shell, I have two major options to get audio from the
web: streamed OGG for live broadcasts and streamed RTSP (RealPlayer)
for audio-archives.

I'd like to capture the bit-stream for both formats (OGG and RTSP) and
convert them to MP3 or AAC for playback on an MP3 player (which I have
yet to get... chances are it'll be an iPod shuffle 512 MB, but if
there any *good* ones out there that support OGG I might consider them
instead).

(1) OGG

I have a hunch that it'll be possible to do it for OGG format since I
can actually DOWNLOAD the file using wget and any web browser (e.g.
<http://oggtrial.nm.cbc.ca:80/cbcr1-toronto.ogg> as referenced in
<http://www.cbc.ca/livemedia/cbcr1-toronto.m3u>) directly to disk.

I suspect that I could create a cron entry (anacron would be pointless
for *live* content ;-) that did:
wget http://oggtrial.nm.cbc.ca:80/cbcr1-toronto.ogg
at a certain time (e.g. 21:05), and, then at the end of the program
(21:59) would run another cron along the lines of:
killall wget

I also suspect there are some apps out there that can be coaxed into
automagically converting OGG into MP3 or AAC format (if I can find any
OGG plug-ins for iTunes I could use the magic of Unix under OS X).

(2) RTSP or WMP

This is where I'm not entirely sure what to do. Since the archives are
streamed in an RTSP format that I cannot download directly to file
with wget or another web browser I'm stumped as to what to do. ASX
format for WMP is just as much an enigma -- I don't know how to get
<mms://wm05.nm.cbc.ca/cbcr1-toronto> into a file directly.

Also, neither format play nicely on either YellowDogLinux or Ubuntu
(WMP is not supported on PPC and I have yet to get the
RealPlayer/Totem application to play anything without complaining
about unsupported format).

Any thoughts? Anyone else have any success doing something similar?

Thanks, Eric.