Hack Moyles - Audio segmentation with RTMP

BBC R&D @ Mashed

Enhanced podcasting

Come see us at the HMI and Accessibilty with BBC R& I talk where we'll tell you how to hack the Chris Moyles show to make it do what you want;)

An example of content segmentation is enhanced podcasting where chapters with individual titles, images and URLs can be signalled.

Currently, only iPods and iTunes support enhanced podcasting using a proprietary system defined by Apple. We proposed and contributed to a new open standard using extensions to the ID3 specification (a metadata tagging format for audio), and ID3v2 tags now support chapterisation.

This can now be used to segment MP3 files, and mark up each segment with text and image data. If this is widely adopted it would allow the ubiquitous MP3 format to be used for enhanced podcasting which would be compatible with a large variety of media players.

Of course, you could use this capability to write your own podcast player that gave you nice chapterised podcasts presented exactly the way you wanted them.

Useful things

A webpage with our RTMP based enhanced MP3 player and links to RTMP streams.

A webpage with our HTML based enhanced MP3 player and links to enhanced MP3 files

...and all the documentation and LGPL'd source files for both the RTMP and HTTP players for you to play with.

To create your own enhanced MP3s, you could use our open source authoring tool and player application.

For the latest enhanced podcasts, our experimental enhanced MP3 podcast service for the Chris Moyles Show is updated every week.

You might also want to see the ID3v2 specification and the ID3v2 chapter addendum

See also our Audio visualisation page for other cool things you could do with audio.

For more information on the day, please talk to Alia Sheikh or Chris Newell