Episode: 250
Title: HPR0250: What Ogg Player
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr0250/hpr0250.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-07 14:51:02

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Hmm.
Hello ladies and gentlemen, my name is Cam Fallon and welcome to another edition of Hacker
Public Radio. Today's episode is going to be about choosing the correct Og 4Bus digital
audio player. I have very specific requirements when it comes to selecting a digital audio
player and there are as follows. First of all, it needs to be solid state because I need
to make sure it's rugged enough that if I drop it, it's hard if it's going to crash. I
need to be able to take it outside in various different weather. It needs to be able to
take a bit of rain, cold, heat, that sort of thing. It needs to be under 100 euros or 100
dollars or whatever. Largely because if it gets lost or broken I don't want to be out
any more money than that and if it caused more than that I would have the feeling that
I need to be overly protective of the device. Ideally something around 70 euros, 75
euros would be sort of in the ballpark of what I'm looking for. But most importantly,
I want to be able to use the player to play the Og 4Bus format. I've already done
the Hacker Public Radio on using socks to speed up the spoken word and podcasts so that
they don't sound like chipmunks and because of a bug you can produce MP3 and only output
tag but that's fine. That's fine because I always buy a player that supports the Og 4Bus.
The most of my MP3 collection is still in indeed, most of my music collection is still
in the MP3 format. See how they all MP3 things ingrained into our minds. We have MP3 players
and we have an MP3 collection, very, very sad. But we will fight this. Anyway, my music
collection is mostly encoded in the MP3 format and as that's a loss full format, just
like the Og 4Bus format is, I don't want to transport from onto the other because the
quality of my recordings would only decrease. But I now make a point that when I'm buying
music, I buy it in the Og 4Bus format and I buy it in another format and then encode
it from the original into the Og 4Bus format. The best format by is the Flack format which
is the free audio format that will give you exactly what the artist released. So you don't
lose any data in the reencoding. With MP3 and Og some data is thrown away more than
likely you probably won't ever hear the difference, but it's important to know that it is thrown
away. A few years ago I did a search for Og player and I found at the time that the Samsung
had a line of like candy bar, well, gum, you know, spearmen gum type formats of an MP3
player that, again, I do it, it's not an MP3 player, it's a digital audio player and
that's support to dog. And I've purchased that since then, my wife has also got one and
she listens to her music which is in a mixed MP3 or Og format and just really matter because
she's using the Samsung line which is the UP-U2 format model. Now that works absolutely
fine in Linux, you just plug it in and it comes up as a USB disk and you can copy
your files over and back, you can go to a wins machine if you want or another machine
and it all works very sweet. Now unfortunately her one died yesterday and I ordered one on
ball.com which is a Dutch website and it arrived today. Before I met my purchase, I of course
went to wiki.xiph.org which is a site that maintains a list of Og format, Og compatible
portable media players and this was on the list. Now it is not safe enough to assume that
just because they played the Og format that your troubles are over there because you
hit a thing called the MTP Media Transfer Protocol which is according to Wikipedia. It
is a protocol devised set of customer extensions to the picture transfer protocol where as picture
transfer protocol was designed for downloading photographs from digital cameras, media transfer
protocol supports the transfer of music files from digital audio players and movie files
are portable media players. That all sounds very nice and everybody is out to help us. However,
when we move on to the next section we see that the media transfer protocol is part of the
Windows Media framework and as close to related to Windows Media Player Windows Vista has built
in support for MTP. Support for XP requires Windows Media Player tender hire and Mac and Linux
systems have software packages to support it. We just go to the drawbacks section of Wikipedia
and it says by design MPT devices are not treated like traditional removable drives.
So that means you can't if you plug them in, they don't come up with USB disks. The actual
file system is implemented by the device, not by the computer's operating system. In theory,
the OS may hide the differences but this is unfortunately not the case in Windows, Mac OS and
also in Linux. This also means that conventional file system recovery tools will be of no use if
the drive is cropped or crashed. Now that's all very well but what this means for us is that we
lose a lot of convenience. That means you just can't stick in a drive into any computer and it'll
work. Generally these things are formatted as a as a fast file system which is fairly universal
even though Microsoft owns a patent on that. But why would they implement this protocol? Why not
just let you plug in a device and it comes up as you know the eDrive and Windows or it comes
up a slash media slash you know slash Samsung or whatever under Linux and the reason for that
is support for digital rights management or digital restriction management depending on which
side of the fence you sit. So essentially I don't want a media player that supports that.
However I order this player anyway and that is because I realized following a post on
the XIPH website that there is a opportunity to put an internationalized version of the firmware
on that device. So the device arrived today. I did a LSU USB, see my Hacker Public Radio
episode which I haven't recorded yet on the LPI certification. No it's not dead, it's just
comatiles and that's come up with the number zero for E8 column 507D as the identifier.
And that can be loads of both about how to handle this under Linux. Now the traditional method
on the Ubuntu form is to install GNOME AD2 GN OM82 and what this does is it provides support to
media player applications such as RhythmBox and to things like Amarok so that you can
support transfer of audio files. Now you need to edit your UDEV rules lines to put in different
calls for different things. However that to me is a pain in the buttocks because I have quite a
lot of machines that don't have these these applications on. I find these applications very heavy
and I just want to be able to use my standard CP tools put in my media device into my WRT 54G
and with the miracles of bash potter I come down in the morning it's charged and all my
all my podcasts have been uh have been transferred over and everything is happy. Now in theory you
could say that this player is from my wife and so the whole process of putting the files on there
in the first place would be a one-off like however that is not the point we will not accept
we will not accept restrictions thank you very much. Anyway so my my idea was while I'll get this
device and I will try to put the other former firmware on the device and make sure that it supports
just usb mass storage drive. I followed the instructions on their forums and
and which I'll have a link to in the show notes and also on my website kevfollow.com. It is a fairly
fairly simple enough procedure. There is one thing that you need to be aware of and that is
you need to follow the MTS mode drivers and not the MTP drivers. So carrying on that if I did
wasn't able to do the firmware on update and this I was going to return the device with
with a note to Samsung saying and ball.com saying thank you very much but no thank
so suffice to say the firmware update worked because this is being recorded on my wife's
Samsung YP-U3 as we speak. So happy ending to this tale. Word of warning word of caution is when
you're buying a digital audio player and you want to support AUG go to that website wiki.xiph.org
look for your device there and make sure that you don't not only does this play AUG but that you have
the ability to have it come up as a usb mass storage drive. That's my friend has been another
public radio and if you're sick of listening to my voice remember there is one guaranteed way to
get to make sure that it won't appear as often and that is to you yourself record a podcast
and send it in to hackerpublicradio.org the admin at hackerpublicradio.org or get your friends
to record a segment and have them send it in to admin at hackerpublicradio.org.
and with us I wish you very very good.
thank you for listening to hackerpublicradio.htr-smotorbycaro.net so head on over to caro.nct for all of us