Majority Internet Radios

[Paul]

It should be pretty obvious by now, that no one in the audience owns a standalone Internet Radio box.

At least a few in the audience, know how to use computer programs (ones that don't have "radio" in their name), to perform this function. VLC plays lots of stuff. In Linux, VLC is so clever, it can play currently received TV programs from a TV tuner card. It just can't do that in Windows (no code for it). In VLC, you type in the carrier frequency ("216000000") and it plays the TV from it.

But it's still good to discuss the topic, so they'll know what you're on about.

"Not connecting" could be a bad URL, a change of CODEC. You didn't mention whether the affected channels were only BBC or not. Some in the audience, did know the Beeb was changing their setup for this (MP3 codec to MP4a codec, streamed the usual way).

I'm having some trouble playing MP4a on my Windows 11 computer, and this is causing news videos to "disappear" on the web page, to be replaced by no frame at all on the screen. So I am aware that MP4a (some flavour), is a rat bastard of a CODEC. It would not be a surprise if one of your older Internet radios could not handle that and would just sit there silent.

The nice thing about hardware, is it is useless without firmware/software support. I have bought $500.00 gadgets that were obsolete almost as soon as I got them, and then I couldn't use them any more. I've been burned this way before.

Paul

[Theo]

Well, I used to own one. Only Reciva shut down their platform, so none of those radios work any more.

I think Majority use the Frontier Silicon platform for at least some of their radios. So presumably the problem affects anyone with a radio on the same platform.

Supposedly:

older ones like the Peterhouse* use the MediaU platform which has removed support for the BBC streams. MediaU was bought by Frontier and seems to have been deprecated.

Theo

• the names are seriously kitsch if you're from around Cambridge

[jim.gm4dhj]

I know about the BBC problem.....funny thing is they all work tethered to o2 or 3 network...answer that one

[David Paste]

I don't know if this is true; I have no issue playing video on BBC sites on an android phone or windows PC or Linux PC. IIRC use of MP4 based CODECs is free for the end user. I have not encountered any problems with it at all, with one very curious and exact exception, but it's not relevent to this case.

[Andrew]

We've been here before in 2015

I wasn't aware that even more changes are occurring

[jim.gm4dhj]

stuff the BBC

[Paul]

If you wanted help debugging a station, at a minimum you'd have to tell someone what URL the radio was using. For example, this is what someone reported a year ago, regarding Internet Radio:

While listening to KUSC at

there are occasional breaks in the stream. Usually they last only a second or less, but sometimes they are several seconds long. I cannot tell whether this is a problem with KUSC, VLC, my Internet connection through Spectrum, or my PC. Do you know of a way for me to determine the sources of this problem?

That link is using https, so the session won't be readable in Wireshark. It returns a URL which appears to be only for the current session, which makes it harder to debug. VLC is able to play the above ("Open Network Stream").

[Picture]

You can get a copy of VLC here.

Paul

[jim.gm4dhj]

I hate computers too much to try any of that....sorry...just want them to work