Are the BBC ever going to improve the quality of its internet streamed Radio
MY DAB radio gave up the ghost a few weeks ago and since my PC is essentially a media PC and connected to a DAC I decided to listen to the dab radio stations via the internet, I stick to FM for other stations. Overall the quality of the commercial stations are pretty good, Planet Rock streams in good quality wma and Absolute (aka Virgin) streams in a whole host of formats (aac, mp3, real, ogg, wma etc) at a variety of bit rates.
The issue is still with the BBC who still use 64kbs on realplayer which sounds pretty bad. I have read that BBC had planned to upgrade the service by July but it's now November and it's still the same. I know they've upgraded the listen again feature in Iplayer which is great but seem to be dithering with live streams.
Does anybody else know anything more?
pudley:
Cheers for this, looks promising for the future. Shame my ISP (virgin) doesn't support multicast yet so I can't try it. Looks like I forgot to take into account the issues with bandwidth and the popularity of the BBC over the more niche commercial stations.
Also looks like multicast support is only found on the top of the range broadband packages, oh well may look at getting a cheap dab tuner after all.
Excellent article from Stephen Green on this very topic in Hi Fi World - sorry WHFS&V! He runs a regular radio column and DAB bit rates on the BBC are a sore point with a lot of folk out there. Moreso when mainland Europe is going down a completely different (and apparently better) route.
ÿBBC has begun testing higher bit rates for the live Internet streams!ÿ
http://digitalradiotech.co.uk/2008/11/bbc_testing_live_internet_streams.php
With the exception of Radio 2, 3 & 4 (on FM with a good roof aerial) the rest of the BBC transmissions on DAB and internet are pretty lousy.
I refuse to use RealPlayer on principle (just a vehicle to foist endless adware, spyware, bots and nagware on the unsuspecting) and it dismays me that BBC had to use such a sinister partner for internet radio all this time...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RealPlayer#Criticism
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This looks likely
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http://www.bbc.co.uk/multicast/radio/ÿ