Hi Carsten,
I also use a Python script to access online media such as youtube, called youtube-dl. It often needs to be updated to work with the newest changes on youtube, but it also works with a number of other websites including various media libraries of TV and radio stations. So I like the general idea of using such scripts to extract the live stream URL for radio stations and then listening to those with MPXPLAY or MPLAYER which are both available for DOS. Having to deal with tunein.com, which also seems to require a login, could make things more complex than they tend to be on the websites of the radio stations themselves, which often have listen now live links to their streams for users who are not in range of their FM or other broadcasts or who simply prefer to listen via internet. At the moment, the following 3 cases are in my bookmarks: - one station has an icecast server which offers a simple HTTP URL for an infinitely large MP3 "file" - one station offers a M3U playlist via HTTP which simply is a file containing the HTTP URL of an MP3 stream again - another station uses Akamai as content delivery network which offers M3U8 Unicode-playlist files which then point to the audio delivered in small segment files The latter would probably be a problem for DOS, but having a plain HTTP URL of a simple MP3 stream, optionally accessed through a playlist text file, would be quite feasible to use as long as you have a network-enabled MP3 player. If you did not have one, you would have to download the MP3 as long as the show is on, then truncate the download and listen to it after the show has ended, which is not very convenient at all. As Karen mentioned accessing an Ubuntu computer via SSH, the youtube-dl script could be run on that computer to get the URL of the actual radio stream, or preferrably the URL of the (dynamical) playlist file. The URL could then be used together with a DOS media player to listen to the radio station. The URL might change frequently. I remember that the Python script is surprisingly large and complex, so I do not expect that to work on Python for DOS. It actually is a ZIP container with 800 files which would unpack to more than 5 MB and which import: base64 binascii calendar codecs collections contextlib copy ctypes datetime email email.header email.utils errno fileinput functools getpass gzip hashlib hmac io itertools json locale math netrc operator optparse os os.path platform random shlex shutil socket ssl string struct subprocess sys tempfile time tokenize traceback uuid xml.etree.ElementTree xml.etree.ElementTree zlib. About Dectalk USB: People have tried to use it in Linux with speakup ( http://linux-speakup.org/ originally a screen reader) which is supposed to support, apart from the speakup software, Accent PC/SA, Apollo, Audapter, Braile 'n Speak and similar Blazie products, DecTalk Express/External/Internal PC, DoubleTalk PC, Keynote Internal PC, LiteTalk or DoubleTalk LT, Speakout and Transport. After booting, DecTalk PC (ISA card) and a number of software synthesizers additionally become accessible. For example Fonix seems to sell a software which has the same voice as DecTalk? The problem is that only the serial port versions of DecTalk are supported directly, not the USB version: http://www.axsol.com/at_decusb.php Note that the device actually has both ports, USB and RS232. So people have tried to use it from Linux by connecting USB to serial adapters to their PC. That can be accessed like a Dectalk Express, but they got some delays caused by the extra abstraction layer. Note that the USB port of the Dectalk USB can still be connected to provide power for the device, which avoids having to use the separate wall power adapter. https://www.spinics.net/lists/linux-speakup/msg32819.html https://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/linux-hardware-18/4-second-delay-in-a-dectalk-usb-after-typing-4175685905/ This could also be interesting for DOS users in case they have computers which no longer provide serial ports. If suitable USB serial port drivers can talk to the DOS software which would use Dectalk, then they could still use it. That would be a question for Bret Johnson (free drivers) and Georg Potthast (shareware drivers). Note that according to a newer discussion here https://mail.gnome.org/archives/orca-list/2010-April/msg00328.html the price of the USB version was rather high, so it would be a bit of a waste to use it in Dectalk Express emulation mode with USB serial converters. Carsten, thanks for the text version of Firefox link to brow.sh - interestingly, the author has an article about getting rid of facebook/google: https://tombh.co.uk/deleting-facebook-and-google Liam, I would have expected Linux to also work for blind users with the GUI, with limitations regarding which apps are supported well enough? As you say, using shell apps is not everybodies taste, although the shell can be quite powerful. I completely agree that having to type even a few commands may simply scare people. It is like having to flip switches in regedit inside Windows and you can hide THAT by asking people to click a script which calls/automates regedit. Thinking that Mint is just one of the popular distros, I was not aware of Mint aiming to be looking like Windows. I remember seeing a GUI which looked like MacOS on a Linux laptop and asking the user whether they liked Apple, but they were not even aware of the similarity! Ironically, I know some programmers who switched to Mac because they want both a nice GUI and a command line which is at least some Unix style, but my impression is that the BSD offered by Apple is actually rather inconvenient. So they surprise me by taking the effort to get a less nice shell only for a nicer GUI, but of course the shell in Windows would be even less nice. People always complain about Linux being too complicated and text oriented. That was 20 years ago. If you do not want to, just do not use the shell. Very simple. If you do not get access to the last fine-tuning: People rarely complained about Apple limiting choices for the sake of "simplicity". Actually Apple made some things easier at the cost of making other things much harder, but people accepted it. They even changed the whole CPU architecture many times, but apparently Apple users are more than willing to buy new copies of their things for the new CPU when they buy a new computer, or even accept some apps becoming unavailable. Not sure what makes Chrome OS and Chromebooks so popular. Maybe better marketing and more computer sold with pre-installed Chrome OS? Pre-installation makes a big difference. Even given how trivially easy Linux installs can be, people are still afraid of the "risks". Or maybe people wanting to be able to use the many, often proprietary, Android apps in parallel to Linux apps? Note that your article series is a bit older: By now, I would tell everybody who switches from Windows to Linux to NOT try to download apps by hand, as they are used to from Windows, but also to NOT install them using the shell. A very convenient way is to open the graphical software library thing of your distro, use a few search terms and click on "install". This works pretty much like the usual app stores. Finally, it is ironic that people are made to be afraid of how different Linux is, but when Microsoft introduces big changes to the look and feel of Windows or Office, people cast a short sigh and just adapt. Actually I know cases of switching to LibreOffice after the MS Office GUI became to different from what it was before, but those are rare. Regards, Eric PS: Of course, there was a typo in my mail: One of the text to speech engines is called MBROLA (like umbrella). > ...I use a command line application (on MacOS) to access youtube > videos and music streams (The application is called mps-youtube > and is written in Python). This application is not a browser... > As far as I see, tunein.com does not provide the music/radio > content themself, but they aggregate content from other places > (such as German radio stations)... _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
