Software to Buffer and Delay Audio Playback? 86
NaDrew asks: "Fox has seen fit to use two of its worst broadcasters (Joe Buck and the horrid Tim McCarver) for the upcoming World Series. I'd love to just turn down the TV and listen to the Giants' regular broadcast team (Duane Kuiper, Mike Krukow, Jon Miller) on my local Giants affiliate radio station, but as a DirecTV user this doesn't work. Why? Think about it: The radio signal traverses the 20-odd miles from Sutro Tower to my home in Palo Alto in a fraction of a second, but the video signal goes from KTVU's broadcast center in Oakland via satellite to DirecTV's operations center in Boulder, then via satellite again to my home--22,500 miles x 4 bounces equals almost 100,000 miles. Coupled with the MPEG processing done at DirecTV's operations center, this adds up to a delay of about six seconds.
What I would like to do is buffer the audio from my radio for the appropriate amount of time and then play it back in sync with the video. Ideally I'd like a software solution that will run under Win32. A Google search yielded some specialized hardware solutions but nothing for my purpose.
Ideas, pointers, even 'you idiot it's right here' flames are welcome. Thanks!"
play the radio back through a windows box (Score:2, Funny)
Radio Delay (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Radio Delay (Score:3, Informative)
Record the radio via the Line-In, set it to stream with a 5 second delay. Send the stream through IceCast [icecast.org] and connect with XMMS/WinAmp and away you go. Heck, you could even use one of these [radioshack.com] and connect your soundcard's line out to your television and control the whole she-bang with your remote control.
Re:Radio Delay (just do it all locally) (Score:1)
Anyway, try this. It ends up with about a 10s delay for me to encode / re-encode.
## command to oggenc line-in and play it out again.
rec --type=.wav -o - | oggenc - -q 5 -o - | ogg123 -
Try removing the oggenc line, and do something like the following:
rec --type=.wav -o delayme.wav & ; sleep 6 ; play delayme.wav
I never realized how much fun this kind of stuff is... and consider: plug in a radio overnight and OGG the station to disk. (or do it all with a Hauppauge WinTV/Radio card and you can cron up specific radio shows as you want). With OGG, I'm getting ~25 mb / hour on quality 5 (approximately 64 kbps, which is almost exactly the quality I can get from radio broadcasts). Burn each show to CD and bring it in to work, and skip through all those annoying "Laser eye surgery" commercials, but still listen to the music. You can probably get all this automated w/o much trouble at all, which is the coolest thing about linux for me. Sometimes it's tough to remember just how much power and control you can have by putting simple, well-designed commands together.
rames@spike:/usr/local/music/106.7$ ogginfo Oct18.ogg
Processing file "Oct18.ogg"...
New logical stream (#1, serial: 68036320): type vorbis
Vorbis headers parsed for stream 1, information follows...
Version: 0
Vendor: Xiph.Org libVorbis I 20020717 (1.0)
Channels: 1
Rate: 22000
Nominal bitrate: 50.000000 kb/s
Upper bitrate not set
Lower bitrate not set
Warning: EOS not set on stream 1
Vorbis stream 1:
Total data length: 183817997 bytes
Playback length: 435m:34s
Average bitrate: 56.267717 kbps
--Robert
Old fashioned method.. (Score:2, Informative)
Place the sound input to the one of the recorder mechanisms and take the sound output from the other mechanism.
You can controll the amount of delay between the two by varying the speed of the motor.
Re:Old fashioned method.. (Score:2)
Hmm, six seconds eh (Score:5, Funny)
DMCA Violation (Score:5, Funny)
The modulation of an analog audio signal over a high frequency carrier wave is an "effective" copy control mechanism.
By turning up your speakers really loud so that anybody can hear the broadcast is a circumvention technology that is not only illegal to implement under the DMCA but is also illegal to tell anybody else how to implement it.
You sir are an INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY THIEF and are no better than the cranked up dope head that steals the purse of the poor widowed pensioner to pay for his next hit.
Re:DMCA Violation (Score:1)
PS: my last post was, apparently my 500th slashdot post. I need to get out more.
Re:Broadcast rights Violation (Score:1)
The speaker can't "broadcast" beyond your home unless you want the baseball hit squad to show up on your doorstep.
Radio Delay (Score:1)
I guess I'm just not a big enough sports fan to understand...
Use your imagination (Score:2, Funny)
-1 Offtopic +2 Funny -3 Funny = doh!
Multi-purpose audio tool (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Multi-purpose audio tool (Score:1)
Simple Solution (Score:2)
Re:Simple Solution (Score:1)
Simple... (Score:2, Informative)
Get a TiVo (you know you want one anyway), start watching the game, pause for six seconds to fill its buffer, then resume watching, happily in sync with the radio.
Re:Simple... (Score:2)
Re:Simple... (Score:2)
I think you have it backwards.
Right, sorry. Somebody mod that down (-1, Poor Grasp of Chronology).
Fortuntately, I'm compatible with my wife. We have a VCR with "commercial advance", a feature that marks commercials after a show is recorded and automatically skips past them on replay. After viewing a few shows this way, we were watching live TV and a commercial came on. "Why are we watching this?", she says. "Can't you just fast forward through it?"
Re:Simple... (Score:1)
Caution: Use could result in widespread "Lone Gunmen" postings.
Re:Simple... (Score:1)
I've actually noticed this with DirecTV: I'll be watching football, and about five seconds before a big play, the people downstairs would start celebrating.
Re:Simple... (Score:1)
Read the problem again. What you say would make his audio play TWELVE seconds before his video feed.
You got it backwards. He doesn't need a solution to delay the video.
Again, no offense to you for reading the question wrong, but Whoever modded you up is...... uhh... _not_ supposed to have mod points.
Re:Simple... (Score:1)
Re:Simple... (Score:1)
I wish I had some appropriate analogy for this this situation. The SF Giants are the only sports team I truly care about and the tools Fox has foisted upon us make me want to pull an Elvis on my TV. People have been calling the radio station all week begging them to put a longer delay on their broadcast. I have been looking for a similar technological solution myself.
Re:Simple... (Score:1)
Anyway the PD [ucsd.edu] software mentioned above looks like a complex, but workable solution. If I can make it work I'll follow up here.
Re:Simple... (Score:1)
Joe Buck is pretty good, especially with a decent partner.
Re:Simple... (Score:1)
Well, that's a very good suggestion, if by "happily in sync" you mean "off by twelve seconds".
Re:Simple... (Score:2)
I'd laugh, if it weren't for the fact that I catch myself starting to do this *almost every week*, before I remember, dammit, it doesn't work this way!
My current solution (which I haven't even begun to work on yet) is to:
* Get an FM radio card
* Hook it to a linux box in the basement
* Get streaming shoutcast working
* Point my Rio Receiver at it
Somewhere in there I'm going to have to add a delay, either at the shoutcast level, or (if necessary) as a separate process in the FM->shoutcast pipeline. Extra points awarded if I can make it easily variable (and controllable from the Rio), but that's even lower on the priority scale.
Of course, until the Redskins start winning again, I won't have much enthusiasm for this.
LONG-term plan? Replace the single FM card with one of those cool high-end A/D converters and get GNUradio running, so I can select any of my favorite off-air radio stations on the fly, and listen to 2-4 of them at once.
But I gotta mow the lawn, first.
Hardware solution for this (Score:5, Funny)
Get a spool of about 1,800,000 km of wire and use it to connect your speakers to the radio with carefully placed signal boosters/repeaters.
YMMV
Re:Hardware solution for this (Score:2)
Got a TiVo? (Score:4, Interesting)
1. Run the DirecTV Video straight to the tube.
2. Connect the Audio from your Radio Tuner to the Audio In on the TiVo.
3. Watch the DirctTV feed and listen to the TiVo feed.
4. Pause/Fast Forward the TiVo until the audio is in sync with what you're seeing.
To make sure the TiVo doesn't decide to change channels or anything, you might program it to record something as long as the game (like the game.)
Re:Got a TiVo? (Score:1)
The problem is the radio signal arrives in advance of the video feed. Your TiVo can do nothing to fix that.
Don't mod this up; mod the parent (and equivalent posts) back down.
Re:Got a TiVo? (Score:2)
Moderators, please mod parent down.
Re:Got a TiVo? (Score:1)
---Audio-->Tivo, wait 6 seconds-----> TV
---Video-->No Tive, already delayed-> TV
See, the arrive in sync at that point.
Re:Got a TiVo? (Score:1)
you aren't using the right google search string (Score:2)
http://www.google.com/search?num=100&hl=en&lr=l
Some nitpicking (Score:2)
> the MPEG processing done at DirecTV's operations center,
> this adds up to a delay of about six seconds.
Given an overall system processing delay more than an order of magnitude larger than the total signal propagation delay through space, why even bother mentioning it, let alone do the math? That 100K miles adds only a small fraction of a second to the many seconds of processing on the ground and in the transponder.
Re:Some nitpicking (Score:1)
In any case, it doesn't really matter the cause of the delay, and I appreciate the suggestions made in this thread to work around it.
Re:Some nitpicking (Score:1)
Actually, a fairly large fraction of a second - about 0.54 seconds, if you wanna get picky.
MPEG doesn't contribute to delay (Score:4, Informative)
It's much more likely that KTVU has a playback delay set on their video server, mainly for the same reason that radio has one: bleeping out profanity before it hits the air.
DirecTV certainly has a playback delay of at least 4s, which gives their automation system (which I also service) time to switch to an alternate stream if something goes wrong with the current one.
Anyway, my point is your placing blame on the wrong parts of the process. That doesn't help with your case, of course. But my suggestion is to do exactly what the broadcasters are doing (except a lot cheaper):
Run sound from your reciever to the line in on your soundcard. Record that with any sound recording program (the default Windows Sound Recorder will work just fine). Have a player up with the record target file ready to play, and start playback manually when you think the time is right.
I haven't tried this so it might not work if Windows locks the record file during recording, but essentially that's exactly how it's being done on the video servers the broadcasters are using. I'm sure there's a better way to do this in Linux, but I haven't got around to playing with any of the Linux media tools yet.
Re:MPEG doesn't contribute to delay (Score:1)
Re:MPEG doesn't contribute to delay (Score:2)
That's pretty funny!
Anyway, any bleeping is done by a human, and they're bound to make mistakes, especially since they're just sitting in front of a switcher waiting for a good time to cue the commercials. I doubt a professional announcer would do something like that if he didn't think there was somebody manning the button, they can get in serious trouble for that.
DirecTV MPEG processing was the only other thing I could think of that might affect it.
Actually, the MPEG processing is probably happening at KTVU. That's pretty much the state of the industry at this point. DirecTV might further compress it in their facility (or recompress it, I guess), but that would add any significant delay.
The playback delay would be at both sites, though, and there are a lot of reasons for it. The 2 most practical reasons I've already listed, but when I'm testing the servers I usually delay playback up to 40s. Sometimes you can have some wierd issues if the playback starts too soon. I wouldn't expect that in a real world situation it would be nearly as critical, though, since I run them at or slightly above the maximum sustainable bandwidth of the RAID controllers for a minimum of 2 days.
Easy (Score:1)
Set it up to stream audio, and connect your radio to the sound card that WME is running on. Start it encoding.
Using Windows Media Player you can connect to the encoder (either on your local machine or a network machine) and listen to the streamed audio. There will naturally be a delay, which you should be able to tweak by playing with the buffer settings in WME and WMP.
I reckon you could get this to about 6 seconds.
Re:Easy (Score:1)
Seriously though, good idea and I'll give it a try, along with the PD [ucsd.edu] software mentioned above.
Thanks for all the responses.
Install Linux (Score:1, Funny)
use winamp (Score:3, Informative)
Re:use winamp (Score:1)
Re:use winamp (Score:2)
Electronics project! (Score:1)
Add more playback heads and you can sell it to your neighbor as a home-made guitar delay box
AudioMulch might just do the trick (Score:4, Informative)
Cheap hardware solution (Score:3, Informative)
.
I have an Alesis Nanoverb [alesis.com] that I use for sound design work. You can get them on Ebay for under $100 [ebay.com]. Acording to the specs [alesis.com] you can get over 1200ms delay per channel (loop left out to right in for 2400ms or about 2.5 seconds). Correcting the delay involves turning a nice analog knob.
The Alesis QuadraVerb [neato.org] has a full 5 seconds of delay per channel [alesis.com] and should do the trick for you for about $130 [ebay.com]
SD
Re:Cheap hardware solution (Score:2, Informative)
A TiVo for radio? (Score:2, Funny)
So you want a TiVo for your radio? We're sorry, but with ClearChannel you just need to wait a few minutes before it's broadcast again, so there'd be no market.
The easiest solution (Score:2)
Voila, it's that easy.
Re:The easiest solution (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:The easiest solution (Score:2)
Simple (Score:1)
Old school or digital.. (Score:2)
Then again.. this is all a lot of work just to watch a silly sports event. (:
The station will do it for you? (Score:1)
That's easy... (Score:1)
Seriously, check the esound sources for the esddsp program. Modify it so it uses a large buffer, then run it on your radio app. 20 minute job.
Can be confusing... (Score:1)
I was watching a football (soccer) game once using the superior radio commentary and the sound turned off on the TV. It came down to a penalty shoot-out and the commentator shouted "he's missed it!", a few seconds later the TV showed the striker hoofing the ball straight over the bar. Commentator must have put him off...
Echo unit... (Score:2)
Forget all this "set up a wma streaming server" etc. It's too complicated for this job.
My experience (Score:1)