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