I've recently discovered that xm radio provides streaming audio for subscribers with existing radio id accounts. I have multiple radios, so I thought I'd give it a try. The web interface only supports Windows and Macs – no linux. Fortunately, there is a way around that.

The streaming audio is in Windows media player format. MPlayer supports this format. I did a search for plugins for firefox and found the mplayer-plugin. The binary rpm for fedora Core 3 installed into a location that Firefox wasn't looking, so I just copied the plugin files from /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins to ~/.mozilla/plugins (or something like that – I did it at work so can't reference it right now). Once the plugins were found, the XM Radio Web interface worked well enough. The mplayer plugin was embedded in the page. It doesn't display quite right – there is a blank box in the top middle of the browser window and the player isn't fully displayed, but that doesn't really matter. The player controls are visible and you can use the web interface to change channels. So it essentially works. And it was easy to install with FC3.

Kinda cool, since I can't use my xmpcr at work. Unfortunately, the streaming audio for most of the commercial news sites are not available. But cinemagic is. :-)