Changing your featured iRadio stations
Last Updated: Sunday, February 01, 2009
I was getting a little tired of looking at the 'Featured Stations' in the dec's iRadio station screen knowing that 2 of the 3 links were dead and I had no interest in the one that actually worked. So I began thinking about how I could change them to something more suitable. After a little experimentation, I found that I could host my own featured station set and so this is how my Internet Radio screen looks now:
If you'd like to change your dec over to this screen, all you have to do is edit the following lines in the /opt/odin/.realnetworks/Odin_1_0 file:
remove or comment out these lines:
TunerOdinFeaturedStationsURL=http://realguide.real.com/partner/odin/stations.rx
TunerOdinImagesBaseURL=http://realguide.real.com/partner/odin/pics/us/80x60
TunerFeaturedStationsURL=http://realguide.real.com/partner/odin/stations.rx
TunerImagesBaseURL=http://realguide.real.com/partner/odin/pics/us/80x60
and add these lines:
TunerOdinFeaturedStationsURL=http://www.k0lee.com/de100c/database/stations.rx
TunerOdinImagesBaseURL=http://www.k0lee.com/de100c/database/images
TunerFeaturedStationsURL=http://www.k0lee.com/de100c/database/stations.rx
TunerImagesBaseURL=http://www.k0lee.com/de100c/database/images
You will have to be pointing to Robert's iRadio station server to make this work since those are new stations, so please follow these directions if you haven't already switched over to it.
After editing these lines, just type 'killall go' and it will restart the main application and update to this screen. Sometimes it takes a few minutes after the dec reboots to work so give it some time to download the stations.
The first show, KenRadio, is an entertaining daily 30-40 minute talk show that focuses on technology. You'll find a new show every Monday-Friday. The second station I chose because I'm a Penn Stater :-). The last one is a short video news update ( fair and balanced ;-) that has pretty good video quality for a 233 Kbps stream. I should mention that the second and third stations are only appropriate if you have broadband since their bitrate exceeds the capability of a dial up connection.
If you want to do your own personalized featured stations, you can copy the stations.rx file to your http server, edit it to point to your stations, and then point your dec to it as shown above. Similarly, the 80x60 (approx) graphics can be placed in another directory and linked to the associated stream