This website aims to make it as easy as possible for people to listen to all the fabulous radio programming that the British Broadcasting Corporation produces.
The iPlayer is a wonderful bit of technology, and the BBC should be commended for all they have done to make radio freely available to the entire world via their website. However, the iPlayer has one major limitation - it relies on Adobe Flash in order to work properly.
Well, a lot of people can't or won't install the latest version of Flash on their computers. Also, a number of mobile devices and Internet radios don't support Flash, so you can't use iPlayer from those devices.
Until recently (October 2009) the BBC provided what they called a 'low bandwidth' alternative to Flash. This used a technology called RealAudio which has been around since the early days of the Internet. Consequently pretty much every device you can think of supports the RealAudio format.
Unfortunately nothing stands still in the technology world. It costs the BBC money to continue to make programmes available in RealAudio, which is now an obsolete technology. Consequently they have decided to remove the RealAudio option from the iPlayer.
The good news is that (for now) the Real Audio programmes are still available - just not via the iPlayer website. That is where iplayerconverter.co.uk comes in...
This site uses data feeds which the BBC have generously made available as part of their backstage project. From those data feeds the site can provide a link to the legacy RealAudio programming for most radio shows. Moreover, the site also exposes the BBC Programme ID (pid) for every radio show, which can then be used in third party software such as the popular get_iplayer tool for Linux users.
My understanding is that all the RealAudio programming will be turned off by March 2010. Before then the BBC will be providing programmes in Windows Media Audio (wma) format in addition to the existing Flash format used by iPlayer - as of November 2009 Windows Media is finally being rolled out.
iplayerconverter.co.uk will continue to provide RealAudio feeds for as long as the BBC make them available. Moreover, we are presently updating the site to make the Windows Media Audio feeds available in addition to the current RealAudio feeds.
Yes - in addition to providing RealAudio programme feeds we also offer some Google Gadgets that you can use on your webpage or blog. We also offer a special version of the site for older mobile phones and instructions on how to use our feeds if you have a Reciva Internet Radio.
I started this site so I could listen to BBC Radio on my Nokia N95, which only supported RealAudio. It soon became clear there was a demand for the service, and the increasing number of visitors since those early days has borne this out. We currently have hundreds of users visiting the site every day!
For the technically minded, the site is built with the Microsoft .NET framework (C#) and runs on Windows Server 2003. I don't charge for use of the site (indeed the BBC forbid the commercial use of their programme data) and running costs are covered by the advertising you see on each page.
We will shortly be adding some information on how precisely this site operates to our articles page.
If you have any more questions then please don't hesitate to contact the webmaster.
Site copyright ©2009 Reincubate. BBC and iPlayer are trademarks of the British Broadcasting Corporation. Schedule data is supported by backstage.bbc.co.uk. CSS template is the Ultimate 'Holy Grail' 3 column Liquid Layout by Matthew James Taylor.