BBC Radio 3 HLS outside of UK

Posted by: Winnie Bago on 01 July 2015

Hi folks

 

I updated my Unitiqute2 to the latest firmware version last night, and all went without a hitch (apart from having to lug my old PC into the living room because I don't have a laptop here!).  Anyway, all is well, apart from the fact that I can't pick up any BBC stations in the higher quality format.  Under "Naim Choice", I get amongst others, BBC Radio 3 (MP3 44.1 kHz 128kb/s) and BBC Radio 3-320K UK AAC, which when selected states "Can't play. Station unavailable".  All other BBC stations are 128K MP3s.  Does the higher format only work in the UK?  At the moment I'm in Spain - I also have a NAC-N172 XS back in London, so can't tell yet whether it's me, or the vagueries of my Spanish Movistar broadband supplier.  Can anybody shed some light on this?  It's very nice to listen to the BBC but even nicer to listen to it in good quality.

 

Cheers

 

WB

Posted on: 01 July 2015 by engjoo
Originally Posted by Winnie Bago:

Hi folks

 

I updated my Unitiqute2 to the latest firmware version last night, and all went without a hitch (apart from having to lug my old PC into the living room because I don't have a laptop here!).  Anyway, all is well, apart from the fact that I can't pick up any BBC stations in the higher quality format.  Under "Naim Choice", I get amongst others, BBC Radio 3 (MP3 44.1 kHz 128kb/s) and BBC Radio 3-320K UK AAC, which when selected states "Can't play. Station unavailable".  All other BBC stations are 128K MP3s.  Does the higher format only work in the UK?  At the moment I'm in Spain - I also have a NAC-N172 XS back in London, so can't tell yet whether it's me, or the vagueries of my Spanish Movistar broadband supplier.  Can anybody shed some light on this?  It's very nice to listen to the BBC but even nicer to listen to it in good quality.

 

Cheers

 

WB

The HLS stations are only for UK based listeners. They do this by limiting access from IP addresses registered to be located in UK. 

 

 

Posted on: 01 July 2015 by Dambor

I was about to post the same question Winnie Bago has asked, and also from Spain. What a bummer HLS is for UK only!

Posted on: 01 July 2015 by Winnie Bago

Thanks engjoo.

 

I agree, what a bummer.  Ah well, something to look forward to in London, which is saying a hell of a lot!

 

Cheers

 

WB

Posted on: 09 July 2015 by PaulinPosset

There are dedicated HLS streams for non-UK residents but they are at lower bitrates and it is possible to stream these from the UK using a squeezebox set-up and also using Minimradio so thought I'd try the non-uk url as an "added station: on the vtuner "my added stations" section. It does work so may be worth a punt if you have no other options.

 

This is the url for BBC Radio 3: 

http://a.files.bbci.co.uk/medi...bbc_radio_three.m3u8

 

If you copy and paste into the url section and complete the other boxes then it should work from Spain.

 

Once added the station shows up in 'added stations' of the iradio menu.

 

Not sure I can post a link to the relevant info on the Squeezebox forum but if you search in the 3rd party plugin section there is a sticky about the BBC iPlayer where all the BBC Radio url's, UK and non-UK can be found.

Posted on: 09 July 2015 by bicela
Originally Posted by PaulinPosset:

There are dedicated HLS streams for non-UK residents but they are at lower bitrates and it is possible to stream these from the UK using a squeezebox set-up and also using Minimradio so thought I'd try the non-uk url as an "added station: on the vtuner "my added stations" section. It does work so may be worth a punt if you have no other options.

 

This is the url for BBC Radio 3: 

http://a.files.bbci.co.uk/medi...bbc_radio_three.m3u8

 

If you copy and paste into the url section and complete the other boxes then it should work from Spain.

 

Once added the station shows up in 'added stations' of the iradio menu.

 

Not sure I can post a link to the relevant info on the Squeezebox forum but if you search in the 3rd party plugin section there is a sticky about the BBC iPlayer where all the BBC Radio url's, UK and non-UK can be found.

 Great suggestion PaulinPosset! Thank you, seems it works: HLS 48kHz 101kb/s

Posted on: 09 July 2015 by Simon-in-Suffolk

Thanks Paulin, that link works well in SW France (on my MacBook Pro)

Simon

 

Posted on: 09 July 2015 by GregW

I'm running a Raspberry Pi with a persistent VPN connection to a UK IP Address. I then use Minimserver on the Pi to serve the 320kbps HLS streams to any device that wants it. I also have a proxy server running so other devices in the house can access things like UK Netflix and some adhoc BBC iPlayer. Current uptime since the last reboot is 81 days. I find it very reliable.

Posted on: 09 July 2015 by Simon-in-Suffolk

Greg, are you using the RPi as the proxy server? If so it's woth bearing in mind the Pi is quite IO constrained and can become a network bottleneck. On the Pi mk1 I found sustained total IO bandwidths from around 10mbps in and 10mbps out started to be limited by IO as opposed to CPU.

Simon

 

Posted on: 09 July 2015 by bicela
Originally Posted by GregW:

I'm running a Raspberry Pi with a persistent VPN connection to a UK IP Address. I then use Minimserver on the Pi to serve the 320kbps HLS streams to any device that wants it. I also have a proxy server running so other devices in the house can access things like UK Netflix and some adhoc BBC iPlayer. Current uptime since the last reboot is 81 days. I find it very reliable.

Ciao GregW, I'm wondering if this method is easy to implement also for me in case the link will not longer works in future. If I understand correctly someone needs acces to a UK computer at least?

Posted on: 10 July 2015 by Bluetorric
Originally Posted by Dambor:

I was about to post the same question Winnie Bago has asked, and also from Spain. What a bummer HLS is for UK only!

I don't see why, as its UK listeners pay for the BBC........

Posted on: 10 July 2015 by GregW
Originally Posted by Simon-in-Suffolk:

Greg, are you using the RPi as the proxy server? If so it's woth bearing in mind the Pi is quite IO constrained and can become a network bottleneck. On the Pi mk1 I found sustained total IO bandwidths from around 10mbps in and 10mbps out started to be limited by IO as opposed to CPU.

Simon

 

I am yes. I'm currently using the most recent Pi, with the Cortex-A7 and 1GB RAM, but I didn't have any issues with the previous generation model, I just decided to repurpose it for another task. To be fair the Minimserver instance is only used for transcoding the UK BBC HLS streams, not music and the proxy server never has more than 1 simultaneous connection.

Posted on: 10 July 2015 by GregW
Originally Posted by bicela:
Ciao GregW, I'm wondering if this method is easy to implement also for me in case the link will not longer works in future. If I understand correctly someone needs acces to a UK computer at least?

 

In principle it's not too difficult depending on your Linux/Unix shell/command line skills. I built my solution with shell scripts, using Apache, SSH and OpenVPN.

 

Generally speaking you'll need 4 things:

 

- A Raspberry Pi

- A VPN service that provides a UK IP address.

- A VPN client like OpenVPN to configure and manage your connection. 

- A specific proxy server like Squid or a more general web server like Apache

Posted on: 25 August 2015 by Nagoya

Hello, I can't get Radio 3 on my SU: the display says station unavailable. I tried adding an url on the naim vtuner site but that's not showing up. Any ideas? (I'm in Japan). Thanks!