Windows Media - Listen Again - Update 2
Post categories: Radio,ÌýWindows Media,Ìýstreaming
| 18:20 UK time, Monday, 25 January 2010
As a follow up to my previous posting "Windows Media - Listen Again - Update" I would like to give you a quick status report on our fixes, and some good news.
We have fixed/addressed:
- FIXED: ASX files now contain the correct protocol moniker - 'mms://...'
- FIXED: ASX files now don't contain any spurious metadata, though they don't currently contain any useful metadata about the programmes themselves. This metadata is embedded in the ASF/WMA itself.
- FIXED: ASX files are served using the correct mime-type
- IGNORED: We have not addressed the issue about having a file extension of '.asx' on the end of our Mediaselector generated URLs as we decided, through testing on a number of players, that this made no difference.
Any fixes listed above have been deployed into our live service - so you should now see these changes.
The only outstanding issue from my previous posting is about getting stream URLs for the other geographic footprint than the one your client is in. (If that doesn't immediately make sense - check the previous posting, "Getting UK and International stream details"). The 'work around' suggested remains in place until we can address some fundamental logic within the system that produces this information - perhaps in the region of several months (I'll update the minute I know a more accurate date for this).
To this end, I am happy to say that we now accept that Windows Media Listen Again is available for developers, manufacturers and aggregators to be exposed in their respective services and devices.
Comment number 1.
At 26th Jan 2010, VA wrote:Mr. Alan,
I tumbled upon your blog while trying to find a way to listen to world news using a cell phone. I drive my kid to school and I want him to listen to world news at that time. Unfortunately there is no radio news at that time. So, is there a way to listen to ´óÏó´«Ã½ world news using my cell phone browser ? Meaning, I want to go to a url and listen to latest world news for next 10 min. ?
VA
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Comment number 2.
At 29th Jan 2010, Sean wrote:Hello there,
I live outside the UK, will the "Listen Again" facility be available to suppliers like VTuner, I have a Noxon IRadio which runs with VTuner or will I be able to load Listen Again as a URL directly onto my radio, bypassing VTuner? if so what are they?
Sorry I'm a little confused.
Cheers
Sean
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Comment number 3.
At 1st Feb 2010, Alan Ogilvie wrote:@Sean - 'Listen Again' is available to UK and International users. vTuner has this information available to them, and will likely begin listing them. We don't currently expose links to these Windows Media 'Listen Again' services directly from our website - they are currently only available within things like our AODFeed - a collection of XML files that we keep up-to-date with a 'machine readable' list of everything. (Indeed - AODFeed is one of the sources for vTuner's data)
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Comment number 4.
At 5th Feb 2010, Neil wrote:I would like to see some 128k streams on listen again via wma
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Comment number 5.
At 8th Feb 2010, Paul Webster wrote:Problems when accessing from abroad.
I just tried to access via ´óÏó´«Ã½ AODFeed data from non-UK source
Broadcasting House, 07/02/2010
from 2010-02-07T10:02:00Z
(i.e. well within the availability period)
Leads to
/mediaselector/4/mtis/stream/b00qfzsr
which in turn goes to
/mediaselector/4/asx/b00qfzsr/iplayer_intl_stream_wma_uk_concrete
which returns a 404 error
with text
The requested URL /cgi-perlx/mediaselector/4/gencheck.pl was not found on this server.
However, going through the same process from UK IP address eventually gets to the correctl generated ASX
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Comment number 6.
At 8th Feb 2010, Paul Webster wrote:Forum gobbled up the ASX XML encoding - but not important ... that part worked from UK. Issue is that it fails before then when trying from non-UK
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Comment number 7.
At 9th Feb 2010, John99 wrote:"I am happy to say that we now accept that Windows Media Listen Again is available for developers, manufacturers and aggregators to be exposed in their respective services and devices.
That is good news Alan, glad you are posting updates.
The question is are the ´óÏó´«Ã½ support teams aware of this. Some end users with 'Internet Radios' seem to be finding problems with the streams, but then having difficulty in reporting this to the ´óÏó´«Ã½, when they follow your advice to use the contact forms. See the iPlayer Messageboard:[ /dna/mbiplayer/F13735684?thread=7142189&skip=20#p92185868 (messag#23 & #27) ]
The streams play but have problems with buffering or the quality.
(I am not sure how to add the above link quickly)
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Comment number 8.
At 10th Feb 2010, Alan Ogilvie wrote:I've replied now to the thread on the iPlayer Messageboard. And I'm trying to find out about the error message from the engineers.
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Comment number 9.
At 1st Mar 2010, Alan Ogilvie wrote:Update on that error message - I have spoken with Paul direct. It seems that, in the end, it is something to do with the way certain clients handle redirects from the server combined with how our Apache server is configured. This shouldn't affect anyone who follows all redirect headers properly.
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Comment number 10.
At 13th Mar 2010, Macin Tosh wrote:Alan
Not sure if this is the place to ask about transport controls and WMA. On listen again stuff, transport control (on Reciva internet radios uisng Real) was a great feature. I understand that WMA does not support it, although my understanding is limited.
In a nutshell, will WMA streams on internet radios be susceptible to transport controls?
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Comment number 11.
At 25th Mar 2010, Chris wrote:Is there a document giving an explanation of the ASX Streams used for streaming ´óÏó´«Ã½ Radio stations somewhere?
The format is like as follows:
_________________________________________________________________________
_________________________________________________________________________
Some Media Players don't know how to handle this, and are just creating a playlist of all the streams inside it.
I've spoken to the developers of one player in particular and they don't know how best to handle this, or why there are so many entries?
Cheers
Chris.
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