This is off topic so if you are going to be offended please stop reading.
Vangelis mentioned at the weekend that the World Service is very popular overseas. I don't doubt it. It seems to have a very wide range of very informative programmes. My problem is being selective. At one time I used to use Juice to retrieve all the podcasts I might be interested in and found myself drowning in downloads I was never going to have time to listen to. That is not the reason for this post.
I noticed that some of the programmes mentioned in the discussion about w1, w3 and 15 digit PIDS were limited to dafmed, hafmed and hlsaacmed and a bit rate of 96kbit/s. They also mostly had podcasts, and in the UK I was offered a choice of 128kbit/s and 64kbit/s. I was aware that BBC radio outside the UK was at one time limited to 96kbit/s, but I did not know if that limit still applied. It is difficult to find the answer on the BBC's web site. I don't know either whether the 128kbit/s podcast option is offered outside the UK.
If it is, it seems a lot more attractive than 96kbit/s HE-AAC with the SBR extension from get_iplayer. As Vangelis pointed out a few weeks ago, if HE-AAC with SBR is played on a player that does not support SBR half the bandwidth is lost. I have been wondering how best to deal with that. Converting to MP3 seems a possibility, despite the purists' objection that it is converting from one lossy format to another. It seems ffmpeg does not support SBR, but VLC could be used for the conversion. The podcast is already available as MP3.
Even if 128kbit/s is not offered for podcasts outside the UK, 64kbit/s MP3 is probably better than 96kbit/s HE-AAC with half the bandwidth missing.
There is something else surprising I noticed this morning about the latest episode of Science in Action, p05bdb8p. The original version was limited to 96kbit/s with dafmed, hafmed and hlsaacmed. The podcast version, p05c1hf1, not only had dafstd, hafstd and hlsaacstd at 128kbit/s, but also dafhigh and hafhigh at 320kbit/s.
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