I enjoy listening to scanner feeds from other cities from time
to time. I have found them through Google searches that lead to
scanner sites, etc. One small fly in the ointment is that, as a
computer user who uses Linux and who also happens to be blind, I
can not presently use IE or Netscape or Mozzilla. There are
interfaces for blind Windows users, but they really don't fit in to
the UNIX world all that gracefully if at all.

By using the mplayer (movie player) program in Linux, I can
listen to almost any Realaudio file along with many other popular
streaming audio protocols such as WMA, etc. Now for the problem.

Several scanner sites such as the one for Cleveland, Ohio, NYC,
Portland, Oregon and Tulsa, Oklahoma appear to have scanner links that
are put together in some sort of Windows-centric way, per haps with
javascript, such that I don't see a URL to an audio feed. It could
also be that they use Shockwave which is one of the few formats that
mplayer usually can't play unless one has built it with special
drivers.

Does anyone know the actual link to the feeds for these
cities?

What happens is that one gets to a link that says something
like "Live Scanner Feed," selects it and there isn't anything useful
inside.

On city feeds like Denver or Washington D.C, there is an .asx
file or maybe a .pls file that can be fed to the mplayer program as
the playlist option.

The Washington D.C. feed appears to be sponsored by the local
chapter of the FOP and lets you listen to their digital system. Trust
me. If you hear one, it sounds like nothing else. If someone is
speaking on the radio and there is another radio nearby, the slight
delay caused by the digital processing makes for a very weird reverb
effect.

Surprisingly, there appears to be no present feed for Los
Angeles. There used to be one at one time, but the fellow who ran it
had a message on his site stating that it was down due to home
remodeling.

Finally, a word of thanks to those people and groups who go to
the trouble and expense of putting such feeds on the Internet.

Thanks for any ideas that might resolve some of these sites.
--

Martin McCormick WB5AGZ Stillwater, OK
Information Technology Division Network Operations Group

On 18 Oct 2005 15:42:17 -0500, (Martin
McCormick) said in rec.radio.scanner:

On city feeds like Denver or Washington D.C, there is an .asx
file or maybe a .pls file that can be fed to the mplayer program as
the playlist option.

That's a Winamp feed. There are a number of reasons to use it, among
them free alpha text streaming. (The listener can see what the
scanner has stopped on.)

If you're interested in Long Island, NY, try
http://suffolkscanner.redirectme.net:8000/stream
I don't know whether any software you use will be able to play it, but
the Windows Media Player link on my site
(http://www.webdingers.com/scanner.html) handles it.

In article ,
Al Klein wrote:


That's a Winamp feed. There are a number of reasons to use it, among
them free alpha text streaming. (The listener can see what the
scanner has stopped on.)

If you're interested in Long Island, NY, try
http://suffolkscanner.redirectme.net:8000/stream
I don't know whether any software you use will be able to play it, but
the Windows Media Player link on my site
(http://www.webdingers.com/scanner.html) handles it.

It works like a charm. Sounds like a Motorola Smartnet
system. Here's what I did:

#! /bin/sh
mpg123 http://suffolkscanner.redirectme.net:8000/stream

Those of you who are UNIX devotees will see that's a shell
script, all be it a very simple one. I call it longisland so all I
need to do is type

longisland

at the shell prompt and I am hearing it. Many thanks.
--

Martin McCormick WB5AGZ Stillwater, OK
Information Technology Division Network Operations Group

On 18 Oct 2005 20:40:10 -0500, (Martin
McCormick) said in rec.radio.scanner:

In article ,
Al Klein wrote:


That's a Winamp feed. There are a number of reasons to use it, among
them free alpha text streaming. (The listener can see what the
scanner has stopped on.)

If you're interested in Long Island, NY, try
http://suffolkscanner.redirectme.net:8000/stream
I don't know whether any software you use will be able to play it, but
the Windows Media Player link on my site
(http://www.webdingers.com/scanner.html) handles it.

It works like a charm. Sounds like a Motorola Smartnet
system. Here's what I did:

#! /bin/sh
mpg123 http://suffolkscanner.redirectme.net:8000/stream

Those of you who are UNIX devotees will see that's a shell
script, all be it a very simple one. I call it longisland so all I
need to do is type

longisland

at the shell prompt and I am hearing it. Many thanks.

With your permission, that's going up on the site for *nix users
(attributed to you, of course).

And, yes, it's an 800 MHz Motorola Type 2 SmartZone system.

Actually, pretty well the whole state is covered for scanner feeds.
check out http://www.mattlogic.com/

And there's a few fellas from
http://www.scannerbuff.net/teamspeak/teamspeak.html that have LAPD and
LA County.



Martin McCormick wrote:

Surprisingly, there appears to be no present feed for Los
Angeles. There used to be one at one time, but the fellow who ran it
had a message on his site stating that it was down due to home
remodeling.

In article ,
Al Klein wrote:
With your permission, that's going up on the site for *nix users
(attributed to you, of course).

Certainly! That's fine.
--

Martin McCormick WB5AGZ Stillwater, OK
Information Technology Division Network Operations Group

In article ,
HotShot wrote:


Actually, pretty well the whole state is covered for scanner feeds.
check out http://www.mattlogic.com/

And there's a few fellas from
http://www.scannerbuff.net/teamspeak/teamspeak.html that have LAPD and
LA County.

Thank you very much for the info. I'll have to give those
feeds a try.
--

Martin McCormick WB5AGZ Stillwater, OK
Information Technology Division Network Operations Group

In article ,
HotShot wrote:
Actually, pretty well the whole state is covered for scanner feeds.
check out http://www.mattlogic.com/

It all comes back to me now. I tried

http://www.mattlogic.com/

and remembered that I had found that site some time last Spring, but
unfortunately, the problems of incompatible technology hit big time.

This isn't a personal gripe, but here is what can happen:

I have two browsers that work in text mode in UNIX. There is
one called lynx which is kind of the gold standard for text browsers.
It does just about everything well except javascript which it doesn't
do at all. The other browser is confusingly called "links" which
sounds the same, but obviously is different. The links browser does
do javascript but doesn't seem to be as good at taking a page apart
which is sometimes necessary to make things fit when they don't
normally want to.:-)

The links browser, while having some javascript capabilities,
misses the mark many times on problem sites so it only sometimes makes
a real difference. If I use links to go to mattlogic.com, the browser
sees the first page and kind of goes in to a coma in which all you can
do is shut it down.

If I use lynx, I get a message that says,


FRAME: Header
FRAME: LeftMenu
FRAME: Center

Viewing this page requires a browser capable of displaying frames.

Actually, you can look at frames just fine and select any
links you want on some sites, including this one.
FRAME: LeftMenu is what you want to see the resource selections.

It opens nicely up as follows:


Home
online scanners
chp cad Forums fire weather local weather CA Webcams

California Online Scanning
fcc frequency lookup feed status page Guestbook Get Firefox!

So, I selected online scanners and then Bay Area scanners and read:

BAY AREA ONLINE SCANNERS

SCANNER 1 SFFD & SFPD
SCANNER 2 CDF (Bay Area) & CDF (Sierra's & Northern Ca)
SCANNER 3 Bay Area & Central Valley FD's on VHF 1 & 2
SCANNER 4 CHP
SCANNER 6 Sacramento Trs, ALCO TRS & Livermore TRS

Of these, I selected

SCANNER 1 SFFD & SFPD

That's when things went South. The next page showed what appear to be
trunk IDs


[EMBED]

This is a Uniden 780 Trunking Scanner that I have In the computer Loft
of my home. I live in Livermore CA in Eastern Alameda County.

Right Speaker

Left Speaker


14800 SFFD-A1
14832 SFFD-A2
14864 SFFD-A3
14896 SFFD-A4

and so on. There were no discernible links below this list.

I even dumped the source, not to be evil, but sometimes, one
can build an absolute link (one that actually works) from javascript's
cute way of making relative links which breaks lynx. I didn't find
anything so I don't know how the audio stream gets going.

This is by no means a unique problem to this site. The web
publishing software these days is very proprietary and one has to
really work to make it behave in a generic manner.

Anyway, that's what happened when I tried this site. One
never knows what will happen exactly on any given site because some
sites have plenty of graphics and javascript but are still accessible
because the underlying navigation doesn't require a mouse or doesn't
do whizzbang stuff to assemble the audio feed. You just have to try
it and see.

My thanks to those who set up sites like this since it takes a
lot of work and resources to provide this service. My real
frustration is with Microsoft and other corporate types who dream up
some of this technology with no interest or desire to try to make it
work for all. That leaves the web designers having to do lots of
extra work which is unfair to them, so nobody should take these
observations as a flame or put-down. It is simply a description of
what happened.
--

Martin McCormick WB5AGZ Stillwater, OK
Information Technology Division Network Operations Group

(Martin McCormick) wrote in
:

In article ,
HotShot wrote:


Actually, pretty well the whole state is covered for scanner
feeds. check out http://www.mattlogic.com/

And there's a few fellas from
http://www.scannerbuff.net/teamspeak/teamspeak.html that have LAPD
and LA County.

Thank you very much for the info. I'll have to give those
feeds a try.

Hey, Martin,

If you're still looking for Los Angeles try this (it's a Windows media
file): mms://68.171.134.111:8080

Mike T

Hi Martin!

"Martin McCormick" wrote:
[EMBED]

By viewing the source of the page I've found that in the EMBED tag there is a link to:

mms://mattlogic.no-ip.org:8085

It did not work for my Windows Media Player, which compained that the URL has to have filename.
Maybe it will work in your Unix Media Player.

Other pages on the same site have similar links with different port numbers (e.g. 8081).

Good luck,

Sylvek