Are there any simple BBC internet radio programs for the Pi?

Simple eh! :-) Quite practical though as one can simply keep it in an executable file. Thank you.

Yes, I'd found that already.

Even without the auth stuff, that’s quite a long URL.

Here’s the kind of one-liner I use, with the ffplay command from FFmpeg:

ffplay -nodisp $(cat ~/Links/georgefm_streaming.url)

ffplay (part of FFmpeg) can play m3u8 URLs. What other “many command line programs” could you be talking about?

Isn’t most of the world moving to DAB+ now?

Can’t decide if that is less dumb or dumber than the Doomsday Machine in “Dr Strangelove” ...

In fairness, if they don't hear anything, they open the envelope containing instructions of last resort from whoever was prime minister at the time they departed, which may say "retaliate", "surrender", "go help the yanks" or similar ...

Yes it is long. That's why I have a bash script called 'radiofrominternet' to do the heavy lifting. vlc has the advantage of being controllable from a web browser (--inf=http).

You want scary? It's not fictional. In 1985 the Soviet Union activated what they called the "Perimeter System" aka "Dead Hand", which once activated would look for signs of a nuclear strike on the "homeland", and if the algorithm decided they had been attacked, would launch every icbm in the arsenal, all pre-targeted. Still operational under the Russian Federation.

AIUI, yes, or already did so some years ago.

It's unfortunate for us in the UK - we adopted DAB early, and it was widely (-ish) accepted before DAB+ was developed. Compatibility has kept us back.

David

AT least it would attempt to - I read at the time that when the cold war ended and a lot of weapons were decomissioned with witnesses a good many of them would have failed to either launch or go off.

The majority of DAB broadcast in the UK, if not all are DAB+ and have been for a while

If the Wikipedia page about M3U is accurate then the m3u8 file will just be a text file including a URL to an audio stream. If it's an MP3 audio stream, then that can probably be copied manually to use with any common command-line MP3 player (I use mpg123 or mpg321).

But that BBC URL gives me 403 Forbidden, so I guess it's region restricted and as such I haven't seen for myself. Indeed I don't think I've seen a M3U(8) file before.

Here

The de facto standard is now wifi or 4G and internet radio /TV stations DAB has completely passed me by...

Unfortunately it doesn't work like that. I tried. For hours. It used to when it was an icecast stream.

The only way I have found to play m3u8 BBC streams *headless* is with cvlc.

Maybe I will update my player software to use that in due course

The players need the URL to the .m3u/.m3u8 file itself. Because the links inside it are to segments of audio: typically 3 segments, being the current 10 seconds, and the next two 10-second segments after that. So the file needs to be repeatedly refetched to get updated segment URLs each time.

Common players know how to do this.

mpv "

The streams change every year or two and I don't recall where I got that from but I've found

Steve

Given that it's a "plain" http:// URL, then wireshark (or a simple proxy such as privoxy) could reveal it.

It doesn't work any more