Last week, I wrote about low-bandwidth podcasts — separate feeds of lower-bitrate MP3 files for the bandwidth-conscious.
Today, we’re pleased to announce an experiment: Spark Lite. It’s a podcast feed of Spark’s weekly episodes (starting with episode 52), but each episode is about half the size of a regular Spark MP3 (~7 megabytes versus ~13 megabytes). I hope this will be useful to listeners on dial-up, or those with heavy bandwidth caps.
You can subscribe to Spark Lite at this address:
http://feeds.feedburner.com/cbcradiosparklite
Or copy and paste into your favourite podcatcher:
Like I said, Spark Lite is an experiment, so it may not last forever, and we’ll be paying close attention to if/how it’s used. As always, questions and suggestions are welcome in the comments below, or by email to spark@cbc.ca.
I still think an online MP3 transcoding service would be great. Enter a podcast feed, and it would spit out a new feed with links to more highly compressed MP3s (with user-selectable bitrates). I’d gladly use such a service 
Other Low-bandwidth suggestions and resources
If you’re on dial-up, or if you have a restrictive bandwidth cap on your internet connection, here are a few tips that might help you out when browsing the web.
- Turn off inline images in your web browser
It may not look pretty, but turning off images will help web pages load faster, and in most browsers, you can selectively load the images you want to see.
- Use "off-peak" hours
Listener Jack Chapman wrote in with this suggestion:
" have an 8 Gigabite/month cable plan. I find that I can usually use it up rather quickly. Luckly on my plan we have an ‘off peak’ period between 12am and 12pm which the downloads are on a different meter, – almost free. So I tend to do high bandwidth activities (like watching youtube and downloading podcasts) in the mornings."
- Schedule downloads:
A suggestion from Greg Demetrick via Twitter, then a comment:
"If you have a plan that offers "off-hours" rates, consider using Podcatching software to automatically download the show during those off hours.
I suggested using Juice (http://juicereceiver.sourceforge.net/) since it is free, works cross platform, cross program, and is what I use for my podcasts. Basically you download the program, tell it what shows you want to download, tell it what software you use to listen to those shows, then set a download schedule. The program will run in the background and download the shows you want at the time you told it to look for them. Then it will place the audio file into your audio program of choice so it should just appear in your library after download.
Also, some people don’t know you can also do this in iTunes. Subscribe to Podcasts like you normally do but under settings you can go to the Podcasts tab and set a custom time to check for new podcasts."
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Use a mobile HTML transcoder
Web-based tools like the Google proxy and Skweezer are designed for mobile phones, but also work with desktop browsers to deliver a slimmed-down version of any website.
Do you have any tips/tricks for maximizing a slow internet connection or reducing your overall bandwidth? Leave them in the comments below.
[Original photo by edans]
A transcoder might be convenient for lazy people, but I can’t help thinking quality will suffer if you shove content through two lots of lossy compression. I would prefer to make the low-bandwidth version from the same uncompressed master as the ordinary “high-bandwidth” MP3. As an experiment, why not make a short test .wav available and see how tightly your geek listeners are able to compress it (while keeping it understandable and in a widely playable format)?
I'm a sucker for 295.ca dialup at home. I have high speed at work, but 56k dialup for $3/month is good enough for minor web browsing and email at home. I can't justify 10x the cost ($30/month) to jump to the next speed level with DSL or cable.
Anyway, for CBC radio shows, I "make my own" podcasts using an mp3 player with an FM tuner that can record FM on a timer to mp3. I set it to record Spark @ 4:05pm (after the news) on Saturdays for 30 mins.
Works great.
I use an iRiver T10. The Nokia N800 Internet Tablet also has an FM tuner (sadly my N810 doesn't).
If I could buy dial-up service for US$ 10/month or less, I’d snap that up. Here it costs about the same as DSL.
My experience with dial-up is that you need a second phone line because it takes so long to check mail and load pages that the line is tied up for a good part of the day when you are home. Here are a couple of things I did to make things tolerable when I was on dial-up. Use Opera as a browser and turn off images untill you reach the page you want. Use Thunderbird or Outlook to download email to your harddrive and then veiw them while offline. Only use the internet for the things you really need to (banking, shopping, research) other wise read a book or go outside, you just waste time always waiting for something to load.