Exploring Freedom with Matt Lee

Yesterday Mark introduced me to a new streaming radio station, Beatles Radio. It's a stream of Beatles, Beatles-covers and Beatles-related acts.

To listen, I went to the link Mark sent me via IM, and scanned the page looking for a play button. There wasn't one, but there are links that say 'Windows Player', 'iTunes Player' and 'Winamp Player' as well as 'Custom Player' - I had to make a decision which one would be best, and I chose Winamp. I don't have Winamp, and as it turns out, both iTunes and Winamp both take me to the same location.

Would it be neat if there was a defined standard for internet radio stations to put a tag in their markup with the URL of their stream? Maybe there could be an option for Ogg Vorbis streams too?

Today, when I wanted to listen again, I opened Rhythmbox, and clicked 'Radio' on the sidebar. I noticed there was a button at the top 'New Internet Radio Station' (this would probably be better as an 'Add Internet Radio Station') - I clicked this and typed 'beatlesradio.com', but it didn't work.

So, I propose the following.

<link rel="stream proprietary" href="http://www.beatlesradio.com:8088/listen.pls" title="Beatles Radio" />

<link rel="stream" href="http://www.beatlesradio.com/this/url/does/not/exist.pls" title="Beatles Radio (Ogg Vorbis)" />

The 'proprietary' property would be for stream in formats other than Ogg Vorbis/Ogg Theora, which hopefully will still make it to HTML 5. User agents could see this tag and do something awesome with it. Plugins for Firefox could offer one click streaming of Internet Radio, and things would be good.

• Open Rights Group is hiring a part-time campaigner in London
• Free Software Foundation is looking for a systems administrator in Boston

After the end of August, music purchased from Microsoft's now-defunct MSN Music store will no longer be able to authorize itself for new devices. Put more simply -- if you get a new player or computer, or you decide to upgrade your operating system (which isn't something I'd advise), your music won't be able to come with you. Once September rolls around, you'll be stuck with your music on the five computers you've previously authorized.

This serves as painful reminder of the real ways in which DRM is bad for consumers. When faced with situations like this, it is impossible to speak of DRM as being part of 'rights', when it only serves to restrict the very people who supported the store in the first place. Of course, you can go and buy all your music again from the Zune Marketplace, but that has another, incompatible DRM scheme... and who's to say Microsoft won't pull another stunt like this when they
finally realize the Zune is doomed to failure.

Instead, buy music from services which don't set themselves up to restrict you if they fail. Check out 'A guide to DRM Free Living'.

We're no strangers to love...

Radiohead is having a remixing contest. I suggest you take a good, long look at the terms and conditions before you take part, especially the bit about you having to transfer your rights to Warner Chappell, Xurbia (Radiohead's company) and Radiohead personally, by name, as songwriters. You also need a Mac, and iTunes, and to pay to download 5 tracks (which presumably are DRM free as you're importing them into GarageBand), plus GarageBand, which is proprietary.

However, Radiohead are quite happily allowing people to upload a five meg MP3 to their website. Wouldn't it be funny if people took it upon themselves to upload Rick Astley's 'Never Gonna Give You Up', in various remixes, mashup and other interesting and creative ways, dozens of times, in protest to the rather unfriendly terms of the contest?

Just a thought.

In other news, Sony BMG is apparently threatening people for Rickrolling on YouTube.

I predict the track will get a single release in some form fairly soon. I hope Astley rerecords it and makes a mint off it himself.

Oh, and for anyone else wondering about yesterday's post. Check the date.

So, there comes a time when we all have to figure out what makes us happy. For me, I finally think I've found a place I can be truly content. A lot of my work in free software has been about usability and building communities, which is why it won't come as a huge shock when I say that I've accepted a job with Apple, in California.

On May 12th, I'll be moving to San Francisco and will start working in Cupertino shortly after.

I'm going to be working within the Mac product group, working on the next version of Mac OS X. I hope at least part of my job will building relations with the open source community, but initially I'll be working on user interfaces and won't have much time for that.

For now, my gnu.org email will continue to work, but if you have any questions, email them to macboy@gmail.com and I'll get back to you.

I realise this represents something of a change in direction for me. It won't be an entirely smooth transition, but I hope at least that my friends and readers will be easy on me.

UPDATE: It seems a LOT of people fell for this one. Sorry, but this was just another April Fools :)

Just a note to say that from Tuesday 11th - Thursday 20th, I'll be in Boston, staying at the uber-exclusive Acetarium. I won't be going to Cheers though, as it's basically a tourist trap (and they wouldn't let us sit down to drink last time).

I will also be completing my Moleskine Boston Traveller book. To quote the website:

Boston hosts some of the best historical buildings and sites in the country, as well as many world-class universities. Take a walk on the Freedom Trail to experience sixteen historic sites that shaped American history. The Moleskine Boston, MA USA City Book combines a notebook and city-specific map features into a valuable travel tool.

I love how they qualify 'Boston' with 'MA', as if they'd make a book about the other one.

You should also come to the FSF Associate Members Meeting.

I'm getting a lot of spam comments on here, even with Akismet and other spam filters enabled. I'm going to try a little experimentt for a week - if you want to comment, you'll need either an OpenID or a login with Vox, Livejournal or Typepad.

Also, once you post a good comment on my blog (or at least a non-spam comment), I'll manually add you to the list of trusted commenters, and your post will appear instantly.

Anyway, if you've left a comment in the past, please try and leave a comment on this post, so I can see if it affects things much.

*Please note. This will only work if you're in the UK. *

A bit of background to this. The BBC is funded by every single household with a TV in the UK (except old people). iPlayer is a platform for watching BBC shows you've missed. Initially iPlayer was Windows XP only, and we had a protest about it in London and in Manchester. Then, they released a Flash version, but as Flash isn't free software, users of free software operating systems were still left in the cold. Ashley Highfield estimated there were 400 GNU/Linux users in the UK, and was proven badly wrong.

A few days ago, they launched an iPhone version, even though they've still not released a GNU/Linux version.

You'll need:

• Iceweasel, GNUzilla or Mozilla Firefox
• User Agent Switcher
• Firebug

Finding the stream

Add a new user agent by going to Tools > User Agent Switcher > Options > Options

The first field, Description - enter something useful here, like 'iPhone'.

In the next field, paste this "Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU like Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/420+ (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.0 Mobile/1A543a Safari/419.3" (without the quotes)

Click Ok, and then Ok again.

Head over to http://bbc.co.uk/iplayer/

Bring up a show, and enable Firebug from the Tools menu. A frame will appear at the bottom of your browser window. Click 'Inspect'.

Hover over the player window, in the bottom frame '<object width="512" height="288" type="video/mp4">' will be highlighted.

Expand this element by clicking '+'

You'll see something like "http://www.bbc.co.uk/mediaselector/3/auth/iplayerstreaminghttp_mp4/b00937tc" - copy this.

Downloading

Fire up a Terminal, and type...

wget --user-agent="Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU like Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/420+ (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.0 Mobile/1A543a Safari/419.3" http://www.bbc.co.uk/mediaselector/3/auth/iplayerstreaminghttp_mp4/b00937tc

Playing

You'll get an MP4 file which you can play in VLC, Totem, etc. No DRM. You might want to rename it to something sensible.

Gnash is a free software plugin for Flash. If you're not already using it, please take this time to download and use it instead of Flash.

Update

Paul Completelymadeupname sends this:

Thanks for the instructions on how to download items from iPlayer. It works really well.

I do have one comment. I notice I'm getting around 300kBps on downloads.

It occurs to me that this download rate is way in excess of the rate an iPhone would pull and might both upset the BBC by stressing their bandwidth,encouraging them to crack down on it earlier than they otherwise might and provide a method of detecting the process.

I downloaded a 30 minute episode of a program and then divided the bytecount by the number of seconds in 30 minutes, coming up with 65062.72 Bps. Assuming all files are the same bitrate, I would like to suggest your command example be modified to:

wget --user-agent="Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU like Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/420+ (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.0 Mobile/1A543a Safari/419.3" --limit-rate=65063 http://www.bbc.co.uk/mediaselector/3/auth/iplayer/streaming/http_mp4/b00937tc

This will download the file in real-time, as a streaming iPhone would and hopefully not get up the system manager's nose by spawning a pipe-maxing download-fest.

Also, someone else in the comments suggests that the User Agent is not required for the downloads. I would suggest using it anyway, as the iPhone would.

Back from Houston. I have a wife now. A quick one - why do Red Vines taste so good, and yet, Twizzlers, a very similar looking product, taste so bad?

My pal Josh is trying a little experiment with an EP he put out. Get a free download of his record, and if you like it, pass the link on to your friends. His hope is that this will help him get some more exposure, outside of the major label system, which can only be good for everyone in the long run.