BBC Radio 4 on Ubuntu

Since I've been using various versions of Linux over the past 6-7 years ( going back to Mandrake, Sid and Sarge way back when ), I've always struggled to listen to the BBC radio stations working reliably. I've played with Real Player and it's imitators, and usually end up spending a lot of time on Google.

However, this morning, I did the whole thing in far less time, thanks in part to James Cridland's blog here.

Whilst I didn't have a lot of success with the Real Player and Helix, given that I'm using Firefox 3.0.1. However, there was one very useful posting here: -

<snip>

Mark said at July 1st, 2008 at 8:11am

I’m not in any way a hacker so I don’t know how good this method is, but rather than installing yet another media player I’ve made files

VLC can use;I’ve uploaded the files; You can download them from http://www.tupple.net/radio/ I’ve done BBC1,2,3 and 4 and open any of them with vlc. It sometimes takes a few seconds to connect.

</snip>

I skipped to the chase and opened up VLC ( goodness, I love that little player on Windows *AND* Linux ), and opened the MMS URL for Radio 4: -

mms://wmlive-acl.bbc.co.uk/wms/radio4/radio4_nb_e1s2?BBC-UID=74a7c929ba1d1db781e46027205005eb90d10a7f1040912444dfe8117ceae58f_n&SSO2-UID=  

Not sure who Tupple is but .... thanks !

I've now gone really librarian poo, and created a link to VLC with the above URL ( and have even added the BBC Radio 4 logo to boot ).

Hey, I'm happy ( and drinking coffee ) - what else can I say ?