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

[Brian Dunnette]

Eric-

For RealPlayer streams, check out vsound, which takes the output from a
program and dumps it to a wav file, which you can then convert to
whatever format you like... it's available in universe.

-Brian D.

On Sat, 2005-04-02 at 19:45 -0500, Eric Dunbar wrote:
> 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.
>