[General Topics] Menneisyys:
3. Verdict

As usual, there’s no winner because several factors may influence your decision. Let’s walk over some of them.

If reducing the bitrate to 32 kbps or less is very important because you only have a GPRS connectivity or want to save bandwidth usage: your best choice is HE-AAC v2 (preferably, the WinAMP plug-in version of OddcastV3) if you have a Windows Mobile device. If you have a Symbian one, either a SHOUTcast MP3 stream-capable one or, if you’re lucky enough to have direct connection to the Net (non-NAT’ing mobile operator), you can (also) use Orb’s 3G AAC or RealAudio formats. Given that Orb has the best remote controller / stream selection interface, the latter choice is the best, particularly if you plan to listen to / switch between more than one stream.

You may also want to decide how many radio stations do you plan to transcode. First, let’s assume you don’t want to use Orb either because of the inferior transcoded sound quality at low bitrates (no HE-AAC v2 support – any sane person striving for using really low data usage will want to use HE-AAC v2 and nothing else) or the full incompatibility with your client (Symbian player in a NAT’ed environment).

If only one, then, you can use any of these technologies – even VLC and StreamTranscoderV3 (the two direct transcoders that can’t really be remote controlled without a fully-fledged and, as opposed to remote media controllers, heavily bandwidth-wasting remote desktop controller tool) will do.

If you’d like to easily switch between, say, 2...20 transcoded radio stations without any kind of remote sound source control (WinAMP remote control – again, see the related Remote Media Controllers Bible), you might want to take a look at VLC (started from a batch file so that you don’t need to set up each transcoding session manually each time) or, again, StreamTranscoderV3. These are the best tools for parallel transcoding of some tens of radio stations (depending on your CPU speed and maximal usage you’d like to let). Note that, however, both of these solutions are a bit suboptimal. First, you may also run into the volume overdriving problems I’ve explained with StreamTranscoderV3 – and its limited source compatibility. And, with VLC, you can’t output HE-AAC v2 in any way.

If you need to transcode more than 20…30 stations (so that you can arbitrarily select from them on your handset), you can forget about parallel transcoding at once because of its CPU needs. Then, you WILL need to install a remote media controller to directly control (switch source stations) the sound source on your desktop computer. While there’re remote controllers for all major desktop players, you may still want to prefer WinAMP – particularly because of the excellent integration of the plug-in version of OddcastV3.

If using Orb isn’t a problem with you because

-	the lack of HE-AAC v2 isn’t a problem because, for example, you (also) have an EDGE connection and, therefore, aren’t forced to using GPRS speeds and/or

-	you have a direct, non-NAT’ed connection and/or

-	you have a Windows Mobile device (remember: on Symbian, you MUST have a direct, non-NAT’ed connection for Orb to work! That is, orb is completely ruled out if you’re NAT’ed),

it might be the best choice for you because it’s really easy to set up and use: no need to set up and configure any transcoders and/or remote media controllers at all. Its Web interface is really intuitive, powerful and consumes very little bandwidth – as opposed to some other web interfaces (most importantly, that of VLC, which is really bad in these respects).