The Mormon Channel

Have you seen the Mormon Channel? It is the official radio station of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. You can stream online, listen in HDRadio in select locations, and even download podcasts!

Read this article from the LDS Newsroom for more info.

The link in the newsroom page is broken. There's a stray space (%20) at the end of the link.

zabaki wrote:http://radio.lds.org/mc/eng/

This means that in the future we could have http://radio.lds.org/mc/ita?

RussellHltn wrote:The link in the newsroom page is broken. There's a stray space (%20) at the end of the link.

I saw that a few minutes ago, but refreshed the page and it was fixed! Cleared my browser cache, reloaded, and it was broken again. Weird.

EDIT: OK, I was looking at different pages (duh). The link is still broken. I gave them a heads-up through their feedback page.

And I hope an http://radio.lds.org/mc/por ?

But I can see a problem (again). Like in other new websites from Public Affairs (like that for California Preposition 8, new Mormon.org and others) the Church logo used have a problem. I believe this logo is maked with another font than the "official" font of the Church. You can see this above.



But it's only a detail. The project will be a great blessing, and we hope it in another languages.

Does anybody have the URL for the actual MP3 stream? I'd like to set this up on an internet radio appliance, and not be forced to run from the Flash player on my PC.

Yes there are problems with 'customized players' and wifi radios, it's such taht a well-known service known as Accuradio can't be received directly although it's in .wma format. Basically if it's a bare stream with metadata telling title/artist or program/subject or host, that almost always works. With many players other than Winamp or Windows Media though, the player gums up the works.

Otherwise it won't work with Reciva powered radio databases, or Roku Soundbridges, or some of the other online databases and wifi radios that get their information on where to tune into URLs from those databases.

I've also encountered problems with it dropping after only a couple minutes on, although I'm on a medium-level (cable quality) DSL connection.

Edit: I spotted the reference to the station's player being built using Macromedia Flash. Those almost never work with wifi devices, so there will need to be an alternate URL for the stream for those. Another LDS-themed broadcaster found out the hard way too and provided one as part of the iPhone solution. They found that there are all kinds of iPhone apps that can pick up web radio streams, you just plug in a URL, and it will be among your choices, not everyone is going to want to download yet one more radio app.

JamesAnderson wrote:Yes there are problems with 'customized players' and wifi radios, it's such taht a well-known service known as Accuradio can't be received directly although it's in .wma format. Basically if it's a bare stream with metadata telling title/artist or program/subject or host, that almost always works. With many players other than Winamp or Windows Media though, the player gums up the works.
...

It frustrates me when services launch in a dumbed down restricted mode, and ignore established standards.

If services would follow well supported standards then the service would be widely available anyway and the dumbed down mode could then be added on top of that. For instance a web-player may be nice, but windows users could listen in windows media player without one. When there is ONLY a flash based web player, it cuts out loads of people, and even encourages illicit online service reflectors - like the one I'm going to setup tonight with mplayer and shoutcast.

Of course if we only want 32bit/64bit windows users (and the odd sneaky linux users) to listen to the station then we did the right thing... but why would we want that?

What's more ironic is that the sort of people that get cut out of this service are the sort of people who are placed to be more vocal in these forums.

But I guess I have a few teeth left that I haven't worn out gnashing at move networks, that I can wear out gnashing at this.

Vatican radio on the other hand does it quite well:
http://www.radiovaticana.org/en1/diretta.asp

It supports wma, real (and mp3 in the left column) and no need for any freaky platform-restricted plugins.

Their on-demand is FAST and IMHO beats move networks:
http://www.radiovaticana.org/en1/on_demand.asp

(For sure, lets have move networks plugins for people who need it, but there's something wrong if thats all there is. And it is.)

If there was an html set of pages as an alternative to move networks, I predict that most people would use it because the move networks interface is too slow and awkward. And then we would have the data needed to encourage move networks to improve.

end-of-rant till this time next year.

They say there will be an iPhone app soon. That would be nice. But if they supported standards-based streams, there would be no need - or at least people impatient for iPhone use could use one of the many existing players. I too am frustrated with the flash-based player being the only option. I guess I'll stick with BYU Radio for now.

shawnlg wrote:They say there will be an iPhone app soon. That would be nice. But if they supported standards-based streams, there would be no need - or at least people impatient for iPhone use could use one of the many existing players. I too am frustrated with the flash-based player being the only option. I guess I'll stick with BYU Radio for now.

I've done some wireshark traces, and googling, and it looks like RTMTP is the streaming protocol being used:

http://linux.goeszen.com/rtmp-protocol- ... ading.html

The telling comment "At the moment there are only shaky solutions available to download data that is served via rtmp://. This is why so many content owners and video portals handling “watch-only” video (like hulu.com, BBC iPlayer, Mogulus) are using it in the first place." could explain a lot.

Looks like I'll have to help the hulu hackers open up rtmp so that I can listen to mormon radio on my sreaming clock radio.

Non-techies can financially support the development of open-source rtmp decoding in gnash here: http://www.linuxfund.org/projects/gnash/

There is also rtmpdump at http://linuxcentre.net/getiplayer/download/
which I'm currently trying to coax to dump lds radio.

Once that works I can dump it into a stream into mplayer which can then output a wav which ffmpeg can encode into mp3 and send it to my shoutcast server.

THEN I can listen to lds radio on my clock.

[Must be careful not to skip home teaching while I do this]

I've sent them a couple of bug reports. Yes, they did have a problem on Monday night, by Tuesday it was apparent the techs would have to pull an all-nighter to fix that one, and they got it working right from the server end.

One bug I've sent is that it drops out after only five minutes when listening using the following system setup:

System: AMD 1.8 MHz x86 clone CPU (Pentium 4 type)
Win2k Pro SP4
Firefox 3.10 or MSIE 6 with all patches.
Flash 10 (even reloaded that).

It fails to connect sometimes, either browser, sometimes takes up to two minutes, etc. Usually I know it will fail because I hear a dropout. Refreshing fails most of the time, and eventually it crashes either browser.

Anyone got a fix or workaround?

Please do not post information on reverse engineering the audio stream found in the Mormon Channel. It is proprietary to Adobe.

Thanks for understanding,
Mike

Thanks on the issue of reverse engineering, that always is a problem anyway and is against almost all software licenses to do. I'm not looking for fixes or other things that would violate that.

What I'm looking for is legitimate fixes, that address the problems I was reporting, I have since found there might be some memory issues that might help the dropped connection issue with Flash-based players, there's a knowledgebase article on the Adobe site about that. It is entirely possible that some problems with the player used dropping connections may be due to those glitches that the Adobe document talks about.

JamesAnderson wrote:What I'm looking for is legitimate fixes, that address the problems I was reporting,

Since it uses Flash, you might want to check what version(s) you have installed. It seems to get updated regularly and I don't think the update mechanism is all that great.

So here's what I'd suggest:
1) Download the Uninstaller here.
2) Run it. Click on the details button. If it indicates anything to be deleted on reboot, run it again. If it sill indicates things to be deleted on reboot, reboot immediately. Keep doing it until there's no more "delete on reboot".
3) Go to Adobe.com and get the flash player.

OK, where's the IPhone app? They said it was submitted to Apple, but I don't see it in the app store. I'm getting anxious.

shawnlg wrote:OK, where's the IPhone app? They said it was submitted to Apple, but I don't see it in the app store. I'm getting anxious.

In your posts on this you have referred to "they". What is your source of information?

The project page on the wiki for Mormon Channel iPhone Application doesn't mention any release date (past or future). Perhaps someone closer to that project can comment.

From radio.lds.org we read...

We have also heard from many of you wondering about an iPhone application to listen to the channel. It should be available shortly! The iPhone application is making its way through the Apple approval process.

I'm not aware how long Apple's approval process can take, but I would bet when the app is ready, they will post a note about it on the above website. I would keep checking there.

Mikerowaved wrote:I'm not aware how long Apple's approval process can take, but I would bet when the app is ready, they will post a note about it on the above website. I would keep checking there.

From what I gather from following another LDS Scriptures application, it takes like 7 days to get every new version of the same app approved for posting on the Apple store, even if it is a very small bug fix. But as far as I know for the Community-built application, it has not even really started development.

It could also be that Apple (possibly at the request of the Church) is holding off on the release of the app until the iPhone OS 3.0 is available (on 06/17/2009).

jbh001 wrote:It could also be that Apple (possibly at the request of the Church) is holding off on the release of the app until the iPhone OS 3.0 is available (on 06/17/2009).

I feel doubtful of this possibility. The verbiage on the Wiki page Alan linked to gives me the impression it's still under development. This is confirmed further if you visit the Jira task list for the project, which still contains several unresolved tasks/issues (this can only be seen if you've signed up to be a community volunteer developer and have been granted access).

I will give you this. It could be farther along than I first thought.

This is how I listen to mormon radio on the linux command line:
You can replace pulsesink with osssink or alsasink

To convert the stream to mp3 for my audio appliances, I run this on my fileserver, which gives me a continuous stream to a local icecast server.

Any update on a usable MP3/WMA stream that I could use on my Internet Radio and bypass the Flash player?

kyleh wrote:Any update on a usable MP3/WMA stream that I could use on my Internet Radio and bypass the Flash player?

I believe the Church has actually made a switch to an MP3 stream now, but I will have to ask if it's publicly available yet.

Any update? I'd love to stream this without having to use the flash interface as well.

mkmurray wrote:I believe the Church has actually made a switch to an MP3 stream now, but I will have to ask if it's publicly available yet.

Not yet. It is being tested and tweaked and is not ready for a huge number of connections yet.

Tom

samjam wrote:This is how I listen to mormon radio on the linux command line:
...

My internet radio is a musicpal. The beta firmware is "iphone compatible" and will play the iphone stream of mormon radio:
mms://us-eu-st14g1.att-idns.net/3102_9136_01.asf
It's nice that my internet radio appliance can play mormon radio now.

My dad can listen to mormon radio now without having to boot up his PC.

My mobile phone (windows mobile) is also "iphone compatible" and can play this iphone stream just fine.

My linux PC is also "iphone compatible" and can also play this stream just fine.

I know that internet radio owners, windows mobile users and linux users are such an insignificant minority I doubt we be a even a blip on the iphone mormon radio listening statistics.

Who'd of thought that a windows media stream would bring mormon radio to iphone, linux, and windows mobile - but it's great - nearly as good as the mp3 stream mentioned in preceding posts, whose coming I look forward to.

Hurrah to all involved!

Sam

Any word on getting an mp3 stream?