Gov't (er, Taxpayer) funded Television and Proprietary Media Formats

[Chris F.A. Johnson]

On Fri, 22 Jun 2007, Scott Elcomb wrote:

> yro.slashdot is running a story about the BBC getting into hot water,
> compliments of the UK's Open Source Consortium.
>
> Apparently the row is about BBC's failure to support media formats
> other than Windows Media.
>
> IIRC, there were comments - in the last year or so - that the Canadian
> Broadcasting Corporation wasn't much better.
>
> I just made a quick check of CBC radio and TV online.  (Admittidly not
> very thorough).  Radio One says the stream is in Windows Media format,
> and Radio Two + TV (The National) says it's streamed in an mms://
> protocol.
>
> So a couple questions:
> - Is mms:// an "open" protocol, or at least supported by open source
> applications (via the hard-working and rarely rewarded reverse
> engineering arm)?

       It's great for time-shifting.

    mplayer -cache $cache mms://wm.cbc.ca/cbcr${ch}-${city}

       Replace ${ch} with 1 or 2, and ${city} with the city you want, and
       $cache with a number 32 or greater. E.g.:

    mplayer -cache 128 mms://wm.cbc.ca/cbcr2-winnipeg

    mplayer -cache 128 mms://wm.cbc.ca/cbcr1-toronto

       I use this to put it into the background with no output on screen:

    mplayer -wid 0x1e00f5e -xy 300 -cache 64 -vo xv,x11 -zoom \
      -ao esd,alsa,oss,arts,null -osdlevel 3 -nojoystick -slave \
      -nomouseinput mms://wm.cbc.ca/cbcr2-vancouver >/dev/null 2>&1 &

-- 
    Chris F.A. Johnson                      <http://cfaj.freeshell.org>
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