And to feed back to you (it's your BBC)... The issue here was a peculiar glitch in the signal received by the satellite receiving units at Maidenhead. (At present, all our national network online streams are re-encoded from satellite receivers by our technology partner Siemens).
For a while, we switched over to DAB as a backup source of audio, which cured the issue on most stations. (I say 'most' - one of the DAB receivers developed a fault, but that was soon overpatched. Marvel at the detail I'm giving you here). This was successful, though made BBC Radio 1 slightly distorted (since DAB processing is slightly 'louder' than that via satellite); Radio 1 was switched back to satellite delivery on Monday morning and others have since followed suit. Currently scheduled for next month, we'll switch to encoding national radio (live, and on-demand) straight from the transmission chain within Broadcasting House (using the same processing as the digital satellite feed, which is the best-suited for the internet environment). You'll notice a slew of changes to our audio online over the next few months - and, we hope, a set of new, developer-friendly, formats. (I can reveal that our choices of audio codec does not include Ogg Vorbis. Yes, I was the man who installed it at another national station. No, it is not good value for money to attempt the same at the BBC.) The BBC's FM&T team are committed to being as open as we can - indeed, earlier today I escaped from an exciting conference which used the word "Open" more times than is healthy - so I hope this is interesting to some. However, I'd reiterate that our web form, as linked to by my friend and colleague Alan Ogilvie, is the quickest way to alert us to an issue and get it fixed - little mutes in audio may not get picked up by automated checking systems, and we don't generally sit and watch Backstage (indeed, as you've spotted, I rarely pop in here but am very vocal once I do). j (on behalf of his employer just this once) On Fri, May 30, 2008 at 6:48 PM, Alan Ogilvie <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Brian - I have alerted our teams. Thank you. We are experiencing > on-going problems with a few of our streams, you may notice issues on > some listen again programmes (although I think we are down to the last > few with a problem at the moment). > > In future the best way to contact us about streaming issues is via the > contact pages: http://www.bbc.co.uk/feedback/ > > (there is a direct email address, but it's worth going through the web > form as it will capture useful things like your IP address and things) > > Alan > > -- > Alan Ogilvie > > [EMAIL PROTECTED] > (IP) Interactive Platforms Producer > Distribution Technologies | Audio & Music Interactive > Room 818, BBC Henry Wood House, 3-6 Langham Place, London, W1B 3DF > > > ________________________________ > > From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Brian Butterworth > Sent: 30 May 2008 18:26 > To: [email protected] > Subject: [backstage] Radio 4 on Realplayer > > > Is it just me getting audio mutes every few seconds on the Real Audio > stream of BBC Radio 4 FM. The LW feed is OK though... > > Who do you tell these days? > > -- > > Brian Butterworth > > http://www.ukfree.tv - independent digital television and switchover > advice, since 2002 > > - > Sent via the backstage.bbc.co.uk discussion group. To unsubscribe, please > visit http://backstage.bbc.co.uk/archives/2005/01/mailing_list.html. > Unofficial list archive: > http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/ > -- http://james.cridland.net/ | http://www.mediauk.com/ Media UK is a Not At All Bad Ltd production. http://notatallbad.ltd.uk/legal_info/
