H2G2 Quandary and Quintessential Phases

So Long and Thanks for All the Fish and Mostly Harmless are going to be broadcast as the Quandary and Quintessential Phases of the The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy radio show. Obviously the BBC has the full story.

The trailer for the two phases is in Real Audio streaming format. If you’d like to download a copy to keep, you’ll need a copy of mplayer. Then do this:

mplayer -dumpstream rtsp://rmv8.bbc.net.uk/radio4/hitchhikers/hitchhikers_trail2.rm
mplayer -ao pcm stream.dump

That’ll leave you with a raw wav file called audiodump.wav, with which you can do what you like (except distribute it, of course; I can’t be seen to encourage that). When the shows are broadcast you’ll be able to rip them in the same way. They stay on the BBC site for a week. Sometime during that week you should download the *.rm file and open it in a text editor. Copy the rtsp:// URL from that file and use it in the same place as the similar URL in the commands above. The steps are the same from then on.