Baslinux mailing list

[Karolis Lyvens <karolisl AT gmail.com>]

On Sat, Jan 13, 2007 at 04:08:40AM +0000, Lee Forrest wrote:
> On Sat, Jan 13, 2007 at 06:26:37AM +0000, sindi keesan wrote:
> 
> [delete]
> > > I don't see why you don't just use a regular windoze-wannabee
> > > linux distro if you want to do so much of what they do. They are
> > > free.
> > 
> > You are not making any sense.  You do not need a GUI or a mouse to listen 
> > to streaming audio.
> 
> The GUI/mouse was in common usage _long_ before streaming audio.
> By more than two decades, I believe.

I think that Sindi meant by this that you don't need a powerful computer
with much GUI-ish stuff like X11 to listen to streaming audio...

Meaning that audio streaming isn't really resource-intensive, also,
BL can do this (even without X). You need neither GUI, nor mouse or
"windoze-wannabee distro" to listen to internet radio.

-snip-

> At a typical dialup speed of 1.3KB/s, an hour of listening to
> music requires downloading a 4.7MB file. If higher speeds are
> needed, the file would, of course, be larger.

20-30kbps stream shouldn't be too heavy for 56kbps connection... You
would still have roughly half of the channel unocuppied of radio stream
(theoretically). Besides, these radio streams don't try to take over
entire connection. They only have to maintain ther bitrate; i don't think
that 24kbps stream would choke 56kbps data channel so it is unusable.

> Even if you don't run a GUI you have to have the software and
> hardware to make your screen and keyboard function. /dev/tty1
> is a device file that has an associated device. Same for your
> keyboard. 

How is this related to internet radio?

> YOU are the one who isn't making any sense.

This is outright personal attack/rudeness/trolling.

> The GUI is much older technology than streaming audio. And simpler when
> you look at the whole picture. Pretty hard to access the internet for
> mail or web or ftp when your entire bandwidth is taken up by a radio
> station coming in as a gigantic and never-ending file.

I don't think that streaming audio (conceptually) is any more complex than
GUI:

1. Client requests some URL via HTTP (not always, but i'll take this
   example)
2. Client receives the stream (in case of HTTP (eg, shoutcast uses it),
   via a simple GET request)
3. Client decodes the stream (usually from RealAudio, MP3, WMA or OGG
   format)
4. Passes raw audio stream to /dev/dsp

The tricky part about the client is that it has to be able to identify
and support several straming protocols and contain several codecs.

If you compare this to GUI, you'll see that there too are many similar
complexicities, for example: MANY different models of video cards, lack
of drivers for some of them, lack of optimized drivers for more of them,
several incompatible models of GUI (svgalib, vgalib, X11), client-server
architecture of X11 (which tends to use more resources than it should),
etc. Add this to OS (*Nix, Win16, Win32, VMS, DOS, BeOS) and toolkit
diversity (GTK, Motif, QT, WinAPI, etc), and the result is that GUI
becomes more complex and less compatible than audio streaming... Which
has only about 5 major protocols and a single player can handle most of
them (From mplayer: supports streaming via HTTP/FTP, RTP/RTSP, MMS/MMST,
MPST, SDP)

Also, if you don't want radio to take your bandwidth when you're trying
to read the mail, you could always pause the stream... I don't see this
as a big problem.

Karolis