Oh ogg, you tenacious pup!
Of late, I’ve been really enjoying the podcast. It’s got a very laid back progression that works great. Originally, they were putting it out in ogg and mp3, but at the beginning of the year, they proved how hardcore they were by going ogg only to deliver maximum freedom-y goodness. I heartily support this decision, but my poor iPod Touch that fights freedom from every angle? Not so much a fan.
Of course, having Cydia is the only way this thing is usable. I download all the podcasts I need a la carte, whenever I want them. But ogg… the iPod isn’t quite ready for yet. vlc4iphone is a port of VLC by and it can actually play ogg files.
The downside? Its essentially a proof-of-concept at this point. Theres almost no UI, with no time progression bar, and no play/pause button, so if you wanna listen to something, you gotta do it in one go. Also, it isn’t able to run in the background, so when you lock the screen, it pauses. So essentially, to listen to Linux Cranks I would have to leave the thing on a table with the screen on for two hours. I might as well listen to it on my computer at this point.
I wish Zod could hook up with the guy who did dTunes, as that player works splendidly. As with pretty much everything with the iPod, I will have to wait for the hackers to meet my needs. I don’t mean to rush them, but I just seem to run into waiting for things a lot.
But wait! This morning I saw that ffmpeg is available on Cydia! Yay, I can transcode it into an mp3!
Not so much. After I learned how to use ffmpeg for that purpose, I set it upon the ogg.
The hardware is simply not up to the task. To encode just 10 minutes of the show at 64 Kbits/s took over 20 minutes.
Ok, so now I’m back to what I did last week, which was to transcode it on my laptop and transfrer it over ssh. Thats when I found that transfers over ssh go fast for about 10 seconds before tanking at around 80-90 KB/s. This week, I was at school while trying all this, and the Wi-Fi here has driven me into semantics many times. Needless to say, my efforts to redownload the ogg, trancode it, and transfer it were hindered by crappy bandwidth.
Just in case you were keeping score:
Play the ogg
Transcode the ogg
Download, transcode, and transfer the ogg
FFFFFFFFFFFFFUUUUUUUUUU
Oh well, I’ll do that last one again later.