New Hitchhiker's Episodes Available Online

Michael Sheldon writes "The BBC is now offering the first of the new Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy radio episodes as either Real or WMP audio streams. Meaning listeners abroad can now hear the new series, which started playing on UK radio last Tuesday."

KCRW has original series

[Anonymous Coward]

FYI, Primary and Secondary Phase's are available from KCRW in Real format:

http://kcrw.org/show/hg

FFS!

[Anonymous Coward]

Look you don't have to wait for the BBC put *PUT THEM ONLINE* to listen from abroad. You can listen to Radio 4 *LIVE* via streaming (HHGTTG is on Tuesdays at 6pm UK time)... this story relates to the BBC's "Listen Again" feature which allows to to catch it if you miss it.

Purchase on MP3 from bbcshop

[tod_miller]

Errm... Here... [bbcshop.com]

Or *mule*, gnu*, *azaa it. torrent to mp3's greatly appreciated, all proceeds go to my HDD.

Re:Where can I get the originals?

[SpooForBrains]

Here [amazon.co.uk]. The audio effects make up a large part of the experience, so buying the CD is highly recommended.

Re:So..

[moonbender]

One way that usually works is to set your sound config up to record "What You Hear". Kind of like the analogue gap, except it never becomes analogue and leaves your computer. ;) Of course, that'll only get you uncompressed PCM files and, when re-compressed, artifacts, but I doubt there's anything else you can do.

mplayer to the rescue!

[CoolVibe]

$ mplayer -dumpstream mms://wm.bbc.co.uk/radio4/hitchhikers/h2g3_episode 1.asf &

Share and enjoy, and why don't you stick your head in a pig ;)

Re:So..

[Excors]

I've been using the shareware version of NetTransport [xi-soft.com], which seems to work quite nicely - give it the .ram or .asx URL, wait half an hour, and it'll save the 26MB of .rm or .asf data.

Re:mplayer to the rescue!

[CoolVibe]

grmbl, damn slashdot. Watch out when copy&pasting that, there is a stray space in there courtesy of slashcode.

Re:FFS!

[Anonymous Coward]

Yup, I listened to the first episode on Tuesday here in Wisconsin, live.

But a minor correction: it is actually on Tuesdays at 6:30 PM [bbc.co.uk] their time. That is 12:30 PM my time (central), so that is 1:30 PM Eastern, 11:30 AM Mountain, and 10:30 AM Pacific. Every Tuesday for the next five weeks.

The first new episode was really quite impressive, and brought back a flood of memories from when I'd last read the books 15 or so years ago.

Pre-Order of new tertiary phase:

[tod_miller]

http://www.bbcshop.com/invt/0563510439&source= 841

Original cast and the Life the Universe and Everything, I think Dougie wrote it - although in thier infinite wisdom those fsk-a-wits at the beeb have actually not given the information in the description.

I mean, it is not as if anyone would be interested to know.

I really hate stupid websites. I am not sure if I should buy it - or listen to it. I am just going to go stand in a corner, brain the size of the universe...

Updated Infocom Game

[Ford Prefect]

As trailed a few weeks ago [slashdot.org], there's the updated version of the old Infocom interactive fiction version [bbc.co.uk] of the Guide.

I had a play on it yesterday - I've no idea how they built it, but they seem to have some unholy alliance of Flash, Z-code and XML running it all. It's pretty cool, too - it's the same old game, but with added graphics...

net transport

[Errtu76]

You can save streaming media using Net Transport [xi-soft.com]

Re:RA and WMA?

[SpinyManiac]

Well, I've got it in MP3.

1 Plug laptop into digital TV STB
2 Set STB to Radio 4
3 Record
4 Feed WAV into RazorLAME
5 Enjoy VBR goodness

There's an analog stage in the recording, and finding the cables to go from SCART to 3.5mm jack was a bit of a challenge.

Re:mplayer to the rescue!

[gyrojoe]

If you want to encode it to something else, convert it to wav like this:

$ mplayer stream.dump -ao pcm

Convert the resulting wav file to MP3 (or OGG) and you're done.

Re:There's isn't a 42 joke in here, I swear!

[Aquatopia17]

Proprietary means the radio station (or anything else you're talking about for that matter) is owned by a private entity, unlike the BBC, which is funded/owned by the state (though not as extreme as the state-controlled media one may find in an oppressive dictatorship).

Re:There's isn't a 42 joke in here, I swear!

[Mwongozi]

The license fee for radios was dropped years ago. Only the TV license remains, which funds both TV and Radio. (And the BBC web site.)

Re:net transport

[DoctorRad]

Not to mention the many incarnations of Streambox VCR [afterdawn.com] that are floating around. Streambox Ripper will convert the Real Audio to MP3 or WAV.

Matt.

Re:Where can I get the originals?

[kraut]

You can get a slightly cheaper version from http://www.bbcshop.com

Re:RA and WMA?

[hedley]

Use Streambox (google it). Comes with a transcoder.
Drag drop ra onto it and you can get mp3 out.

Streambox can also pull down any ra content as long as you drill down to the rtsp: tag that the stream uses. Thus I have already saved this weeks HHTG I did not require the Beeb link.

Enjoy!

Hedley

Re:KCRW has original series: .rm files

[Anonymous Coward]

Download them from the de-obfuscated wrapper cgis:

rtsp://go.rbn.com/livecon/kcrw/g2demand/hg/hg021 23 1Episode_12.rm
rtsp://go.rbn.com/livecon/kcrw/g2d emand/hg/hg02123 0Episode_11.rm
rtsp://go.rbn.com/livecon/kcrw/g2d emand/hg/hg02122 9Episode_10.rm

etc. Note extraneous spaces inserted by slashcode.

Download 'em with NetTransport, and rip 'em to MP3 with your favourite ripper.

Re:this is awesome

[iantri]

Yes. You can just dump the stream with mplayer. However, I imagine you are looking to convert it to DVD-Audio or something so that you can play it on your stereo system. Here is the best way I can think of: (Windows)

1. Dump the stream (however you wish). It is important that you dump the raw stream and not record the audio produced by it (Total Recorder is out). Mplayer will do this.

2. Install Avisynth (http://www.avisynth.org).

3. Create a script like so: (save as h2g2.avs or the like)

DirectShowSource("h2g2file.wma")

Playing this back in a AVI player will be the same as an AVI without video, with 5.1ch WAV audio (it frameserves in real-time). 4. Install Besweet and Besweet GUI.

5. Load the AVS file into Besweet GUI.

6. Encode to 5.1ch AC3 or OGG or whatever you wish.

Enjoy!

Sorry, it's a little roundabout..

Re:mplayer to the rescue!

[Hieronymus Howard]

Gentoo users will require mplayer to be compiled with the new (and undocumented) network flag in their USE flags, otherwise streaming will not work.

Re:Updated Infocom Game

[Sean D. Solle]

... some unholy alliance of Flash, Z-code and XML

The back end's a C++ multi-threaded ZMachine running as a web server extension (can be compiled either as an Apache module or an ISAPI DLL).

As well as sending the user's input and the game's output back and forth as XML, it also watches the ZMachine's internal state to send the location, score, number of moves, inventory etc.

It has extra "knowledge" about the HHG game's internals (which is how it can handle the bedroom being dark, house being knocked down etc). This was hard-coded in the release that the BBC are running (due to time constraints - we had to ship on Sep 21st!), but newer builds have an external config file which can let the game twiddle the XML output accordingly, so in theory it could run any of the Infocom adventures.

Shim's Flash client grabs the XML, pulls up Rod's artwork, displays the inventory and handles the text i/o history.

Most of the team is on vacation at the moment (I'm posting in the naive hope that it'll mean less email waiting for me when I get back ;-), but there'll be full spec released in due course.

It's pretty cool, too

Thanks ... glad you like it!

Sean.