CBC Radio Now Streaming in OGG Vorbis Format

[Jason Dunn]

<div class='os_post_top_link'><a href='http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/11/03/0047206' target='_blank'>http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/11/03/0047206</a><br /><br /></div><i>"CBC Radio, Canada's major national public broadcaster is now streaming in ogg/vorbis. Recently CBC had switched from realmedia streams to windows media streams for their radio broadcasts. After receiving a plethora of complaints, suggesting ogg/vorbis as an alternative, CBC has begun a test ogg stream of the toronto stations. They boast in their ogg FAQ that they're encoding with oddcast and streaming with icecast."</i><br /><br />Something smells fishy here. Switching from RealAudio to Windows Media makes sense, because everyone has the Windows Media Player client, but not everyone has or wants to install the RealAudio client. I have nothing against OGG Vorbis, but come on, now in order to listen they're asking people to download and install Winamp 5 in order to listen? How is that possible an improvement? I smell some open source activism here, and when activism flies in the face of logic, it's not a smell I like. :evil:

[sub_tex]

Switching from RealAudio to Windows Media makes sense, because everyone has the Windows Media Player client, but not everyone has or wants to install the RealAudio client.

Everyone has WMP? Not quite. For one, Mac users have to install WMP. And win98 users still have to download codecs.

I have nothing against OGG Vorbis, but come on, now in order to listen they're asking people to download and install Winamp 5 in order to listen? How is that possible an improvement?

Welll the real issue here is that the CBC isn't very knowledgeable on Ogg apparently. One google search for "Windows Media Player ogg plugin" gave me plenty of hits on what to install so WMP can play oggs.

Heck, I NEVER user WMP and I listen to oggs in winamp 2.91. I don't need winamp 5 at all.

So their info given to the user is faulty, not the use of Ogg.

(Interesting though, that their list of things you need to do to listen to the WMP stream is a lot longer than the ogg one.)

Personally I think it's a great idea. Ogg gives them a free codec to use, and they know it works on all platforms. Now all they need is someone to just update the info on Ogg so people realize you don't need to install new players, just new plugins.

[Suhit Gupta]

Personally I think it's a great idea. Ogg gives them a free codec to use, and they know it works on all platforms. Now all they need is someone to just update the info on Ogg so people realize you don't need to install new players, just new plugins.
Yeah, I have to agree. Not that I care about the fact that it is open source but that most of my music is ripped in ogg as I find the sound quality and reliability to be just as good as, if not better than most other codecs.

Suhit

[Jason Dunn]

Everyone has WMP? Not quite. For one, Mac users have to install WMP. And win98 users still have to download codecs.

Mac users? Less than 2% world-wide? Windows 98 and 95 users? Come on, you know those numbers aren't big! I'd say that anyone who's using an OS as old as Windows 95 or 98 probably isn't the kind of person that listens to streaming audio. :wink:

...so people realize you don't need to install new players, just new plugins.

Asking people to install ANYTHING is problematic, and that was my only point. This has nothing to do with OGG and everything to do with giving people the least troublesome way of getting access to the streaming content. I'm against ANYTHING that asks people to download special players or codecs.