Announce: NPR Radio plugin

[bpa]

Attached is a plugin to make it easy to listen to NPR Radio especially as complete NPR programs.

At present users probably use NPR podcasts to listen to NPR program segments. The podcast are program segments and so you can't listen to a whole program easily or play segments for a particular day.

The plugin takes contents from the thin.npr.org website (text version of www.npr.org) and so program contents matches the website. Each program menu (e.g. Morning Edition, All things considered etc.) will list the program segments which can be played separately. For each program, there is a "play all items" which will create a playlist of all the segments in the program - this can take some time (e.g. 20 secs) to start if selected so be patient.

Each program menu also has a "Previous" menu to access previous editions of the program.

Also programs played are in WMA format (typically 97kbps CBR) compared to podcast which are MP3 128kbps.

The Plugin menu include:
* 5 min news Summary
* 24 hr News stream
* all the main programs (e.g. Morning Edition, All things Considered)
* Topics - same as web site content.
* Link to NPR Podcasts directory
* Prarie Home companion (need AlienBBC installed as well)
* link to latest "This American Life" podcast

To install, unzip attached zip into the relevent Plugins directory. There should be a directory called Plugins/NPRRadio which includes files such as install.xml and Plugin.pm. Restart SC and a "NPR Radio" item should appear in the "Internet Radio" menu.

To install NPRRadio plugin on 7.3 or later use the Extension download Plugin and add this repository http://bpaplugins.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/repo.xml

[exile]

This plugin is...absolutely brilliant!

I've wanted this feature for a long time and now it is finally here.

thanks for putting it together!

[Nonreality]

This plugin is...absolutely brilliant!

I've wanted this feature for a long time and now it is finally here.

thanks for putting it together!

I totally agree! Thank you

[Sam Lowry]

Great stuff. My wife will be very happy about this one.

[tamanaco]

Great stuff. My wife will be very happy about this one.

Oh Yeah!... the WAF index is gonna go through the roof when I show her the functionality of the NPR plugin. Thanks!... Thanks!... Thanks!...

One small "cosmetic" request. Can you make the NPR icon appear instead of the generic Radio Station icon in the Now Playing panel of SC Defalt Web UI.

Thanks again...

[bpa]

Can you make the NPR icon appear instead of the generic Radio Station icon in the Now Playing panel of SC Defalt Web UI.

I've tried but the streams are normal http and so standard icons are used. I have an idea that might work but it would be for 7.1 and higher only.

[tamanaco]

I've tried but the streams are normal http and so standard icons are used. I have an idea that might work but it would be for 7.1 and higher only.

I'm on SC 7.2... I'll be happy to test it.

[markseifert@earthlink.net]

Any plans to add Car Talk to the list of shows that can be selected from the menu? This plug in sounds brilliant, and I cant wait to try it. Have been hoping for something like this. Thanks.

[whitman]

Is this 7.x only, or will it work for 6.5.x?

[bpa]

This is a 7.x plugin only - 7.x has some facilities (e.g. asynch HTTP) which made it easy to implement.

A simple 6.5 version could lock up SS for 20 secs and nothing would happen - no screen updates, no buffer refill etc.