Forest radio
Like a lot of Forest fans—particularly those based a distance from Nottingham—I subscribe to Forest Player. The service is pretty good and worth the few quid a month it costs. I can see extended highlights of matches, interviews, and other news stories. The killer feature though is being able to listen to the BBC Radio Nottingham commentary. This is delivered via Flash which isn’t ideal but an improvement on the horrific DRM’d WMV system they used to use.
There remains one problem though: there is no mobile access to the commentary. I guess it may work for you if you have an Android handset which supports flash but I’m not sure your battery would last a full 90 minutes… This means that whereas I used to have productive Saturday afternoons and found out the result at five o’clock, I am now invariably homebound. My girlfriend isn’t particularly enamoured with this situation. It would be great to at least be able to head out shopping or run errands while listening to Mr Fray excitedly describing the latest Lewis wonder-strike.
Now I can. Instructions follow and are hopefully of interest to someone out there. One thing to point out from the outset—I’m your archetypal Apple fanboi so these instructions are Mac/iPhone specific. All of this is completely do-able using other systems I’m sure and I will mention options as I go along. First up, there are four pieces of software I am using for this:
- Nicecast by rougue amoeba on the Mac
- TuneIn Radio on the iPhone (also on Android, Blackberry, Palm)
- iTeleport on the iPhone
- Dyndns service and updater
Nicecast
This application can ‘hijack’ audio from a specific application on your Mac or simply the system audio. It then re-broadcasts this audio on your local network and over the internet. You can listen to the stream using an application which can open the playlist file.
TuneIn Radio
Allows access to thousands of internet radio stations (including those from the BBC and other broadcasters). You can, for example, listen to the match build-up or the often surreal MatchTalk—“Come on you Forest Men!”—simply by finding Radio Nottingham from within the app. As the iPhone doesn’t have a built in tuner I use this app for listening to lots of stations. As mentioned, it looks like it is available for most major mobile platforms.
iTeleport
This is really just a wrapper around VNC with some additional functionality to simplify the process of connecting for those not used to dealing with VNC, IP addresses, ports, &c. You could use any VNC client with a bit of setup. Or if you’re on Windows you could use Remote Desktop (eg. WinAdmin on the iPhone). We need this as you need to be able to access your computer to log in to Forest Player and start the commentary (unless you happen to be at your computer to do this before going out).
Dyndns
This is very much optional but it is free and worth doing. Your home internet connection will occasionally change its IP address (the unique identifier for things on the internet). Dyndns gives you a static address (eg. http://myaddress.dyndns.org) which always points to your current IP address. You will need a small application on your Mac/PC or tell your router to keep Dyndns up-to-date. My Netgear router from Virgin has an option for this. Without Dyndns you will one day attempt to connect to your home computer to get the commentary running and you will find that you can no longer connect as you have been allocated to new IP address.
Here goes!
First thing to do is start up NiceCast and select the source. I’m just selecting ‘System Audio’ as I know I have nothing else running. You can alternatively select the browser you will be using to log in to Forest Player.
You can then set the Name for your broadcast:
Then the quality. I’ve not really tested or played about with this. The quality does not need to be very high I wouldn’t imagine and in order to ease connection over 3G and not use up all of your data allowance I would keep it low.
You are then ready to start broadcasting. Click on ‘Start Broadcast’.
You will see two addresses (Internet and Local). These are your broadcast addresses.
Next up is to get logged in to Forest Player and log in and start the commentary. If you are at your computer still at this point then you can just do what you normally do. If you are out and about then you will need to start up iTeleport (or whichever VNC or Remote Desktop app you use) and connect to the computer. Follow the instructions for whatever you are using. As you will discover, it is a bit fiddly to remote control things using your phone but You only need to click on the radio button for the commentary you want (Forest obviously!) and then fill in the login details. If you can have already loaded the page in your browser then you make things a little easier. A couple of screenshots to give an idea of what this step is like:
If you look at the NiceCast application, you should see the levels bars going up and down. If so, then we’re almost done. On your phone, load up TuneIn Radio. Click on the ‘Web’ tab and enter in the address of the broadcast and hitting go. If you are at home then you can test using the ‘local’ address over wifi, as I have done here:
If you are connecting via 3G or a different wifi network then you should enter the ‘internet’ address instead. If you set up Dyndns then you will replace part of the internet address—for example, http://215.65.87.98:8000/listen.m3u would become http://myaddress.dyndns.org:8000/listen.m3u. Once connected and buffered, you should see something like this and start hearing the commentary on your phone.
The final step is to bookmark the stream for future use.
Finally
The applications I’m using for this are not free. I bought iTeleport a long time ago for a few quid on offer. It is now £15 which is quite a lot. I’m sure there are alternatives which are cheaper.
Nicecast is $40. You can use the trial indefinitely but you are limited to broadcasting sixty minutes at a time. Nicecast is really just a well packaged Icecast server. If you read up about Icecast then you should be able to get the broadcast up and running on Mac, Windows, Linux, &c with not too much work and probably for free.
TuneIn Radio is 59p and amazing at that price. Worth purchasing anyway. Dyndns is free.
Feel free to give me a shout if you have any questions or need some help with this. It’s not exactly straightforward but it isn’t difficult either.
Stuck at a wedding in France? Grumpily eating meatballs in Ikea Croydon? Messrs Fray, McGovern & Chipperfield can be right there with you…
