maemo.org - Talk - View Single Post - Any idea how to get the following radio stations?

	krisse	2008-02-05 , 04:08
	Posts: 1,540 \| Thanked: 1,045 times \| Joined on Feb 2007	#8

Originally Posted by Betty Woo

I think the thing about the tutorial that threw me off a bit was the use of the BBC stations. The ones I wanted were conveniently pre-installed for me so perhaps they're the easiest ones to program in the first place.

There are about five BBC bookmarks already on the player, but that doesn't make it any easier to install bookmarks from other BBC stations.

Just because there's a BBC link pre-installed, how does that tell you the method by which it got there?

If someone was looking for a specific radio station and the procedure was slightly out of the BBC example, the person's hooped. Maybe a couple of real world examples that address things like which of the most common plug-ins will work and ways to pinpoint the streaming addresses?

I'm not quite sure why you regard BBC examples as not being "real world".

The tutorial I did showed a method for getting a bookmark from the standalone player link, and this same method can apply to many non-BBC stations.

The problem with covering other stations is... which ones? If I covered the ones you wanted as well, what about all the others?

I chose the BBC as an example because they're popular, well-known around the world, have a large and consistent set of websites for their stations, and they provide a great mixture of programming (probably a greater mixture than anyone else).

1. I didn't get from the tutorial which player icons worked the best (iTunes, WinAmp, RealPlayer, QuickTime, etc.) or what I should be looking for in streaming formats (.pls and .m3u) so I didn't know what to chose once I got to a web page that had player options.

I did actually say in the tutorial text that Realplayer is a good one to choose, but that it's worth trying other formats too. Most stations only have a small number of options (many stations only have one option), so if it really is your favourite it's worth trying them all.

The problem with naming a specific format or formats is that people will think it WILL work, when it won't always work, and you'll still have to do trial and error anyway.

For example the BBC uses Realplayer, so in theory all of their Realplayer standalone links should work on the tablet, and most of them do, but some of them just don't. (I think it has something to do with the redirects they use when you access the stations on a PC.)

2. My browser simply didn't pick up some of the boxes on a couple of station web sites that contained links to the stream - unless I concurrently ran my iMac's browser that rendered the page properly and simply guestimated where a box *should* be on the N800's browser page.

As I said in the message above regarding the nytimes.com website, it sounds like you have something wrong with your browser as that site works absolutely fine on my N800.

But if there is a severe problem with the way the browser renders a website, there's not really anything I can say or do about in a tutorial. What can I say?

As a newbie, I wouldn't know at this point *what* the expectations are for this browser so boxes not being rendered correctly doesn't seem like an obvious sign of trouble (if it is... I'm still not sure if my browser's kinky or it's just the way the browser handles some pages).

I think your browser might well be kinky, but there aren't really any expectations other than that the N800 and N810 render the vast majority of websites the same way a PC would. If it doesn't always happen, well, that's the world of portable devices.

The only real expectation is that the site will look the same as on a desktop or laptop computer.

There's no hint or tip that can solve problems with rendering because it's entirely down to small devices with small amounts of resources trying to cleverly render pages that were designed for much bigger machines with much greater resources. Usually they pull it off, sometimes they don't, and that's how it will probably always be because pocket-sized devices will always be behind full-size devices in terms of raw power.

And to be fair, sometimes even my desktop PC can't render a page correctly because it wasn't designed for the browser I'm using.

Last edited by krisse; 2008-02-05 at 04:18.

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