AlienBBC - An Experimental Plugin for browsing and playing BBCRadio RA Streams

[Jules Taplin]

Hey folks.

Inspiration struck this evening... and I've managed to knock together a hack of AlienStream to browse and listen to BBC Real Audio Streams. Basically... it parses the HTML pages of the BBC Radio Player, and provides a heirachy of programmes and directories to browse around. Selecting a programme passes it to AlienStream to play it.

It's pretty darned ropey at the moment (multiple ways to break it), and bear in mind that AlienStream isn't exactly bulletproof yet, either. But it's at least good enough as a proof of concept, and it WILL let you navigate to this afternoon's episode of the archers and play it.

Take a peek: http://www.mrtickle.org - second link down - 'AlienBBC'.


Best Regards,


Jules

[Waldy]

Nice one Jules, look forward to trying it in the next couple of days. Been digging around in the BBC Listen again web pages for a while & getting the streams with wget & grep. Now my reason for getting the squeezebox was to get away from the pc so this is an excellent idea.

cheers

Waldy

[waldy]

Jules,

Absolutely brilliant! Probably the best thing since sliced bread Suddenly
all the bbc's rich listen again archive is available at a press of a button
(or three).

It pretty much works as you describe. It is hindered by alienstreams' lack
of error recovery & some work to tidy up browsing & perhaps a pause feature.
( I think the stream rtsp holds the start position of the stream at the end
of the line)

This will certainly be the feature on slimserver that will have the heaviest
use for me. Congratulations Sir, excellent work.

regards Waldy

[waldy]

Kenneth,

I'm setting up a new linux system with this little lot on it. I'll try to
document as I go along. Look back in a week or so.
Which linux system do you have?

regards

Waldy

[waldy]

Sorry Phil,

Never mentioned I had it running on XP. I'm running on Fedora linux. Tried
compiling the source code on XP?

regards Waldy