Alternative to BBC I-Player

I sometimes wish they'd just leave well alone. They had a corking little Listen Again facility on the web for BBC Radio which worked like a dream, and then they had to go and embed it in the I-Player alongside the TV programs, which are no darned use to me anyway, since no-one abroad can access them anyway. To make things worse, it's a pound to a penny that the ruddy thing won't work in any case, throwing up a "program temporarily unavailable" message when you want to listen to the latest episode of The Archers.

Well, I've just discovered a natty wee get-around to get back to the old style re-broadcast using Real Player. You simple enter the following in the address bar of your web browser:

rtsp://rmv8.bbc.net.uk/radio4/xxxx_ddd.ra

whereby you replace "xxxx" with the time and "ddd" with the day of the week. So, for example, if you want Thursday's episode of a tale of country folk, you'd put "1900_thu". As long as you already have the real player application on your PC, this will generate it and set it running just before the start of the program and shut it off two minutes after it is over. So you get to hear if that night's Front Row is worth listening into. Which is nice.