can you broadcast radio on the internet legally without a license?

omnicorp

ok, wher'd you get that joe duffy image?

legofsalmon

I photoshopped it.

Found a pic of Joe Duffy on the net someplace.

Got a couple I use for sigs.... I shall change actually.

omnicorp

PHANTOM GOT THE LICENSE!!!

or so Dr. Static told me.

McGonagles

legofsalmon wrote:

The vast majority streaming via mp3. I have never heard of trouble arising with fraunhoffer over the patents.

IMRO would be the nearest thing to a worry i'd have, but they really aren't monitering it at all. Nor is there any irish regulations that I know of.

On another point although the OGG Vorbis format is of slightly higher quality, ( dear god don't go near wmas, the quicker microsponge realises its a death format the better for us all ) i would still say go for mp3. You will be paying the company for the codecs anywho of the streaming software you use so, they will have no problems, plus it is a universal format, everything plays mp3s!

Yes, everything can play MP3 - even the 25 euro CD portables in the supermarkets, most new
DVD players, and probably every new mobile phone next year. That's the only real advantage
the format has! And the longer people keep producing/encoding for it, the more people that
Fraunhofer will be able to squeeze money out of when they decide to stop playing so nice.

MP4 may be "super hot", but if it's a closed format, you are at the mercy of whatever the
license holders decide to do. Whereas everyone is free to implement Ogg, now and in 10
years time.

iRiver have it in some of their portables, and most video games use it for background music,
because they are a nice big target for Fraunhoffer to go after, but if you know anyone who
works for a video game developer, they don't really make a lot of money: they have massive
costs, a year or two to make any money back on each major title, so any unnecessary expenses
have to be cut...


The OGG format has been fairly well tested to be either higher quality for the same size of file
or bitrate, or the same quality for a lower bitrate. I'm no audiophile, but I can tell the difference
between CD and vinyl (the bigger the room, the bigger the difference!), and listening to MP3s
for a long time is a bit painful to my ears. I keep thinking there's a mobile phone ringing in
the background, almost out of earshot. That's the patented "psycho-acoustic modelling" at
work. You aren't supposed to be aware of the missing parts, just lke you aren't supposed to
notice the edge fringing or "chessboard" patterns in JPEG stills or on DVD movies, but they
are there.

WMA is utter tripe, the only thing worse than it is 1995-vintage RealAudio, but it does have
the backing of the world's richest man, so we are stuck with it for a while I think! And if the
company (or their shareholders) get hungry enough for more profit, they can always start
charging license fees, as they are doing now for the FAT filesystem.

If you use all Free/Open Source software for the streams, you won't be paying anyone
for codecs. Which makes it easier to run it with no income. Which makes IMRO (or whoever)
less likely to come after you for their percentage. Anyone will be happy to pay IMRO a
percentage when their income or earning is zero!


If you want your streams relayed you will have to pay, no question of that.
It's a service, and it requires lots of bandwidth, and if you have any kind of popular
content, the bandwidth needs will go through the roof.
So it could be handy to have a hosting company as one of your sponsors (nudge, nudge!)

legofsalmon

McGonagles wrote:

Yes, everything can play MP3 - even the 25 euro CD portables in the supermarkets, most new
DVD players, and probably every new mobile phone next year. That's the only real advantage
the format has! And the longer people keep producing/encoding for it, the more people that
Fraunhofer will be able to squeeze money out of when they decide to stop playing so nice.

MP4 may be "super hot", but if it's a closed format, you are at the mercy of whatever the
license holders decide to do. Whereas everyone is free to implement Ogg, now and in 10
years time.

iRiver have it in some of their portables, and most video games use it for background music,
because they are a nice big target for Fraunhoffer to go after, but if you know anyone who
works for a video game developer, they don't really make a lot of money: they have massive
costs, a year or two to make any money back on each major title, so any unnecessary expenses
have to be cut...


The OGG format has been fairly well tested to be either higher quality for the same size of file
or bitrate, or the same quality for a lower bitrate. I'm no audiophile, but I can tell the difference
between CD and vinyl (the bigger the room, the bigger the difference!), and listening to MP3s
for a long time is a bit painful to my ears. I keep thinking there's a mobile phone ringing in
the background, almost out of earshot. That's the patented "psycho-acoustic modelling" at
work. You aren't supposed to be aware of the missing parts, just lke you aren't supposed to
notice the edge fringing or "chessboard" patterns in JPEG stills or on DVD movies, but they
are there.

WMA is utter tripe, the only thing worse than it is 1995-vintage RealAudio, but it does have
the backing of the world's richest man, so we are stuck with it for a while I think! And if the
company (or their shareholders) get hungry enough for more profit, they can always start
charging license fees, as they are doing now for the FAT filesystem.

If you use all Free/Open Source software for the streams, you won't be paying anyone
for codecs. Which makes it easier to run it with no income. Which makes IMRO (or whoever)
less likely to come after you for their percentage. Anyone will be happy to pay IMRO a
percentage when their income or earning is zero!


If you want your streams relayed you will have to pay, no question of that.
It's a service, and it requires lots of bandwidth, and if you have any kind of popular
content, the bandwidth needs will go through the roof.
So it could be handy to have a hosting company as one of your sponsors (nudge, nudge!)

Didn't know those 25 quid ones played mp3s!!! Have to get me one of them!

The sample rates and bit rate for mp3s above 160 is decent to anyone less than an audiophile it would be difficult to complain about the quality. Seriously the mp3 is still a great format, it is extremely widely available. Easy to tweak i.e in audio programmes you can set bit rate, sample rate, DRM, channels, mp3pro etc.

I would disagree with you that MPEG 4 is closed technology in a practical sense. Realaudio include decoders, and so does quicktime and winamp. Winamp provides an encoder also to rip cds to, although I use winamp pro, and i'm not sure of the support in regular winamp and lite. But there are already many formats that use the technology. itunes converts to aac files, winamp does mp4s, even nokia phones record the sound on their sound recorders to amr, which is based on mpeg4. And their videos use quicktimes 3gp, which uses mpeg 4 too. In college we are being thought to start forgetting about the mp3 so as to stay with technology, as so much of the media industry, especially parts which overlap in computers, is expanding rapidly.

Anywho, I would love to see OGG do well, it is that bit better quality , and it has open source. But the biggest and the best players havn't been quick to support it. Which is what it all boils down to. If you want to stream you want to make it as easy as possible for listeners as possible. Asking them to download other stuff just to listen is a step for the worse. If it was for a major change that would profoundly affect their audio lives then possibley yes, but for OGG when MP3 is very close, I just wouldn't.


Anywho, with 64-bit processors hitting the shelves now, within the next 5 years those wanting high end home pcs will haev 64 bit machines which will inevitably lead to high end components and software, which will mean death to FAT. ( yay! )

What I was saying that IMRO mightn't come after you for a percentage, but more I think about it, the publishing companies would more so since they will argue that you are playing the artists music and the artist is entitled to a fee for that privilage. I dunno how that will work , as I have said there is no laws regarding it as far as I know.

Otherwise anyone up for killing wmas? I know DRM is a nice idea in theory, but microsponge have put it into the worse practise ever. I used to be refused to play my own CDs on one release of windows media player!!!

McGonagles

The FAT filesystem is default on most Flash and USB storage devices, so every camera
manufacturer is now being asked to license this "innovative" technology from them, for
a "fair and reasonable" fee. FAT32 is an extension of FAT16, which is largely based on
the filesystem that came with CP/M. Some features from UNIX were added, after hard drives
became affordable and people needed to put files in "folders" to arrange them better
(early versions of the Macintosh disk file system didn't support folders either).

The "forward slash or back slash" difference between MS-DOS/FAT and Unix came about
because MS-DOS already used the forward slash for command options, so they cleverly
used the backslash instead - one of those lesser-used symbols that's in a different place
on almost every type of keyboard. Making things hard to find - real innovation!

So the patents (which allow MS to squeeze money out of everyone using FAT) are now
being challenged, seeing as so much "prior art" exists that dates back to before Micros~1
even existed.

And this is income that Micros~1 didn't even know they needed until recently!

They have to grow their profits, to keep their shareholders happy. Being the world's biggest
company (and a monopoly that has escaped punishment) is not enough. Wall Street wants to
see continued growth, so they have to branch out, now that most of their products are
competing with older versions of the same product.

How many people do you know who run Windoze and Office? How many of them have the
absolute latest and greatest (that they went out and bought) version of each? How many
only really need the word processor, but had to pay for the full Office package because it's
impossible to buy it on its own anymore?


Phantom stream in WMA/ASX... We could always ask them to switch to another format, and
someone from PhFM or IBB will say that players for the format is "extremely widely available"
and sure doesn't everyone run Windoze?

McGonagles

(quote deleted)

The supermarket players are probably made from the cheapest possible CD mechanism,
with a cheap and nasty MP3 decoder on board. I've only ever seen one that did MP3, and
it was something around the 25 euro mark. I only had a fiver on me when I saw it, so I
didn't get one.

Or you could spend 150 euro on an iRiver MP3/CD player, and get much better sound
quality and an FM radio, and longer battery life.
Try before you buy, if you can, with a CD-R or CD-RW full of different bitrate files.


As for OGG support from big players - is the BBC big enough for you?
BBC Online were streaming Radio 4 in Ogg Vorbis, but apparently the service was pulled.
(the online division of the BBC has internal political problems, or so I'm told...)

Winamp supports Ogg for files and for streaming - that's most people covered.
More info from: http://www.vorbis.com/faq.psp


There are different definitions of "open" and "closed", but it's a bit like that difference
between "free beer" and "free speech", that the open Source movement point out. Just
because you can download pretty shiny things for a format, doesn't mean that you will
always be free to use it, with no strings (financial or political) attached.

omnicorp

OK, is it legal?