Installing AlienBBC

  

AlienBBC is an additional plug-in for the SqueezeCenter application which allows the Squeezebox to access all the current BBC radio services, including all the live streams and the popular 'listen again' service.

(The BBC insist on using the real player format for their streams, so the Squeezebox doesn't play them without this plug-in.)

Installing MPlayer

You will need MPlayer (a music and video player) installed on your system before you can install the AlienBBC plug-in. Currently the easiest(!?) way is to compile it from the source code; this isn't as bad as it sounds, just follow the instructions:

Log in as root with PuTTY and enter the following to download and install the development tools (be prepared to wait, this takes ~15mins to complete!):

apt-get update
apt-get clean
apt-get install cc-devel

Now go and make a cup of tea as this will take some time to complete (~20mins); when finished, download the latest MPlayer source code to the /tmp directory:

cd /tmp

wget http://www3.mplayerhq.hu/MPlayer/releases/MPlayer-1.0rc2.tar.bz2

(Check the URL and package name above is the latest from the MPlayer website here: http://www.mplayerhq.hu/design7/dload.html )

Unpack the compressed file, and then enter the new MPlayer directory that has just been created::

tar -xjf MPlayer-1.0rc2.tar.bz2
cd MPlayer-1.0rc2

Enter the following:

./configure
make
make install

The 'make' command will take some time to complete (~20mins), probably time to put the kettle on again, when finished you can test your MPlayer installation, from within PuTTY enter the following: (note - if the BBC change the location of the Radio 4 live feed this test won't work)

mplayer rtsp://rmlive.bbc.co.uk:554/bbc-rbs/rmlive/ev7/live24/radio4/live/r4_dsat_g2.ra

You should see the system buffering and then "Starting playback..." with a series dynamic statistics if everything is working ok; press "q" to quit and exit MPlayer.

Installing the AlienBBC Plug-in

Log in as root with PuTTY and download the latest AlienBBC plug-in for Linux (it will be a '.tar.gz' file) to the /tmp directory:

cd /tmp

wget http://www.x2systems.com/AlienBBC/alienbbc-linux-v2.01b1_7.1.tar.gz

(Check the URL and file name above is the latest from the AlienBBC website here: http://www.x2systems.com/AlienBBC/ ), then to install it enter the following commands:

cd /usr/share/squeezecenter
tar -xzvf /tmp/alienbbc-linux-v2.01b1_7.1.tar.gz

chown -Rf squeezecenter:squeezecenter /var/lib/squeezecenter/Plugins/.

Restart SqueezeCenter by entering:

service squeezecenter restart

You should now have the AlienBBC working with SqueezeCenter.

Tweaking AlienBBC

If you want to rebrand AlienBBC as BBC Radio see here.

If you find AlienBBC drops stops working on listen again feeds, there's a tweak, see here.