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."

RA and WMA?

[moonbender]

Shame that they don't offer either MP3 or OGG versions of the show. Wonder why they decided against using them, especially considering that the BBC has some experience with OGG - they used to have some live radio streams running it.

Re:RA and WMA?

[jonwil]

I suspect part of it is not wanting it in a format that can be saved to disk and kept for later (otherwise it would hurt sales when the thing is released on CD or whatever)

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

[ninthwave]

The BBC isn't propietery it is paid for by a license fee which is charged to all owners of Tv's and radios like a tax. They have to be as free as possible as it has been paid for by the UK citizens already.

Live Stream

[rollerbob]

Surely listeners abroad can hear the new series at the same time as everyone else simply by pressing the 'Listen Live' button on the Radio 4 [bbc.co.uk] website at 17:30GMT (18:30BST) every Tuesday for the duration of the series.

Re:RA and WMA?

[Alranor]

So i'm guessing they've never heard of mplayer -dumpstream before then.

Ah well, never mind eh.

Re:RA and WMA?

[Malc]

Experience with OGG? They haven't touched it for nearly two years [bbc.co.uk]!

Personally I'm disappointed they didn't also offer it in FLAC, PCM, DTS, SDDS and Dolby Digital! Give it a rest, stop whining, and be happy that they made it available in the first place. It seems people get moderated up just for whinging about OGG. And no, I'm not new here ;)

Re:Updated Infocom Game

[stratjakt]

As much as I liked HHGTG as a kid, and as much as I loved the infocom games (Planetfall and Stationfall are probably my favorites), the HHGTG infocom game was probably about the worst one they made. One misstep and the game was over, it was completely linear and frustrating.

Check out this little quote on the fate of the "Restaurant" sequel [csd.uwo.ca] that was never released.

Apparantly DNA just didn't "get" the idea of interactive fiction.

Anyhow, is there any way to hear the original radio series, or obtain the original TV series for free (legally, of course)?

Re:RA and WMA?

[mlush]

So i'm guessing they've never heard of mplayer -dumpstream before then.

The Beeb know about mplayer -dumpstream, however 95%+ of the userbase have not. From the beeb's POV a partial solution is better than none at all

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

[Anonymous Coward]

charged to all owners of Tv's and radios like a tax.

No, just TVs; they gave up on taxing radios decades ago, after the invention of the transistor made radios so small, cheap and portable that it was impossible to keep track of them. TV's are getting near that magic transition point too, plus what the licensing people don't want the general public to realise is that digital TV tuners aren't detectable by their much hyped [tvlicensing.co.uk] but rarely seen detection equipment... The TV tax is an anachronism, but politicians like having the BBC utterly dependent on their goodwill = recently one radio reporter did a report critical of the Government, and it scared the Beeb so shitless that a governor resigned,,,

Quicktime

[Anonymous Coward]

The show should be available in Quicktime format -- Douglas Adams was Macintosh fanatic.