[rescue] my NPR interview is up!

[Greg A. Woods]

[ On Tuesday, July 31, 2001 at 00:21:48 (-0600), james at foonly.com wrote: ]
> Subject: Re: [rescue] my NPR interview is up!
>
> Getting realaudio output into "the real world" is fairly simple.  Record
> from AUDIO_CODEC_LOOPB_IN and dump to NAS or simply to stdout.
> 
> If you don't have codec loopback (no audio h/w or pre-Solaris 8) consider
> a simple LD_PRELOAD library to catch the open/write/close calls to
> /dev/audio.  The most annoying part of RealPlayer isn't the lack of an
> audio output dump, it's the lack of command-line scriptability.  There are
> multiple examples of audio capture libs in Dejanews.

The best I might achieve is a fake liboss shared library that's
compatible with the linux/i386 realplayer binary.  Last I discussed this
with NetBSD i386 gurus though they were not sure it would even be
theoretically possible., let alone run in real life.  An "audio capture"
library (which I guess fake liboss is) is only half the solution.  You
have to actually make it work in your system.

The other complication is my main servers, all of which are headless
things sitting in a cabinet downstairs, might each have multiple users
who want to access multi-media content simultaneously.  NAS is the best
viable technology yet the real.com guys brush it off as a dead format
even though there's a lot of active development for it.

It's all really stupid though.  The idiots at real.com should have kept
only one side or the other proprietary, depending on their guess as to
where the best market was.  The current state of having a proprietary,
but free, client is just plain nuts -- it benefits no one, not even
real.com, especially when this means they must, economically, ignore so
many segments of the market (eg. non-Linux workstations, NAS, etc.).

What's most sad though is that now real.com have locked many media
providers into absolutely insane licensing agreements, even rather large
"players" who you'd have thought would have known better, such as the
Canadian Broadasting Corporation, seem to have been locked into
proprietary "our way or the highway" contracts that prevent them from
offering "competing" formats.

-- 
							Greg A. Woods

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