How I listen to the radio (or a lesson in unnecessary complexity)

Posted by stephen on Tuesday, 22nd January, 2008 @ 10:00

Lately I've noticed I have a bad habit whilst working at home of sitting on the sofa with my laptop in front of the TV with some rubbish on that occasionally distracts me from doing anything useful. I'm not sure why I do it, perhaps because I spend most of my day on my own, it's nice to have 'someone else in the room'.

I decided recently that it's time to get out of this habit, and I thought the easiest way might be to switch to a diet of Radio 2, as I do when I'm driving around during the day. It still gives me that sense of not being on my own, but without all the distracting visuals. So the question was, how do I listen to it? Actual FM radio seems a little too 20th century for my liking. And it doesn't help that it'd need a long aerial cable dangling out the back of my amp.

The obvious solution (to me) was to use my MythTV setup to listen to it through the AppleTV. Unfortunately, and inexplicably radio from DVB (Freeview) seems to be a bit broken in the current version of MythTV. I wasn't too disappointed, as Myth always had a habit of being a bit flakey about it, and running a process that routinely consumes more than 200Mb of RAM just to listen to the radio seemed like overkill.

So I started today (somewhat earlier than usual) listening to the live radio player from the BBC website. My problem with this though is it requires RealPlayer, which I'm not a big fan of, also making it tricky to listen to through the AppleTV. It also seems ridiculous to have a 64Kbit stream leaching my Internet bandwidth when my house is being bombarded by 4 higher quality copies of the signal (FM, DAB, DVB-T/Freeview, DVB-S/Sky).

My solution then? Remove one of my three DVB tuners from MythTV and hand it over to VLC and it's rather useful VideoLAN Manager. And with a tiny bit of configuration...

new Radio2 vod enabled
setup Radio2 input "dvb/ts:adapter=0:frequency=842000000:bandwidth=8:guard=3"
setup Radio2 option :program=18560

Now using VLC or QuickTime I can simply visit rtsp://halcyon:5554/Radio2 and listen to it on any computer on my network, streamed on demand. I could have multicasted it. But with wifi and dumb switches, it's a little wasteful. Having copied VLC.app to the AppleTV I can now SSH in to it to kick VLC off and listen to it through my amp. One day it'd be good to work out how to get the AppleTV to tune to it with it's built in QuickTime through the proper interface. Hmmm...

I love technology.