I had to hack to hear my Huskers.

Today's Nebraska football game (against those purple pantywaists from K-State) is televised, but only via Fox Sports pay-per-view. My local cable operator hasn't picked up the option to broadcast the game, so I'm SOL as far as TV goes.

I'm used to this situation, though, having moved out of Big 8 country several years ago. Luckily, I've always been able to catch the games via streaming radio over the Internet. As the broadcast rights have changed hands over the years, the ease-of-listening factor has varied. During this last offseason, however, it suddenly got much worse. I now use only Free (-as-in-speech) operating systems, and it's a major PITA when content providers insist on using proprietary and/or patent-encumbered file formats and codecs.

Intelligent people provide their audio broadcasts as simple mp3 feeds that can be read and enjoyed by almost everyone (even though it's illegal for me to do so in the US!). Asshats like Huskers.com, however, use kludges that take an already-proprietary stream and then abstract it behind multiple layers of useless garbage. The following is an account of what I had to do just so I could listen to the Husker game today.

1. Click the 'listen' link at Huskers.com. This opened a pop-up (strike 1), which informed me that I needed a new browser plugin (strike 2) to view the content on that page. Why the f--k does an audio file want to play in a webpage? Wouldn't it be better in, say, an /audio player/? Anywho...

2. Since (a) I don't want to pollute my computer with that crap and (b) such plugins almost never work well on Linux OSes, I decided to take a peek at the page's source code to try to find a direct link to the broadcast.

3. Success! I found the URL (define) for the page's audio feed. I pasted that address into my browser and told it to open the file using a media player application (Totem, specifically).

4. Failure! Totem told me that it couldn't open the file. That struck me as odd, since I should be able to play dang-near any type of audio file with Totem. I tried reopening the link, but this time I was redirected to a text file...

5. The file's title was 'mediaPlayerAudioOnlyUrl.wvx'. They use a specific abstraction layer (unsophisticated as it may be) with no other purpose than to prevent fans from using anything other than Microsoft Windows Media Player (and, furthermore, any operating system other than MS Windows) to listen to Husker games (strike freaking three)!

6. Undeterred, I went looking for an audio feed URL within the file's code. Again, I found a string that seemed like it should get me to the radio broadcast. Again, I popped the address into my browser. This time, it automatically opened the file in Totem...

7. Success! Of course, I don't know if I can accurately call it a 'success' that I had go through all that hackery in order to hear a simple radio broadcast. I'm busy listening to us kick Wildcat butt, though, so I don't mind /too/ much for the moment. :)

GO BIG RED!