Hi, I've been using Alien BBC for years now - good work - it's really useful! I've have developed the get_iplayer perl software (used for downloading BBC iPlayer programmes) which also does very similar things to Alien.
Firstly, I've noticed that there is a bit of screen scraping in the Alient code (e.g. Plugins/Alien/Parsers/iPlayerParser.pm ) that possibly could be avoided: After some research in to BBC feeds I found that it is possible to get an entire list of programmes for a radio channel using the following XML feed from the BBC: http://feeds.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/<channel>/list/limit/400 Where <channel> is one of: bbc_1xtra, bbc_radio_one, bbc_radio_two, bbc_radio_three, bbc_radio_four, bbc_radio_five_live, bbc_radio_five_live_sports_extra, bbc_6music, bbc_7, bbc_asian_network, bbc_radio_foyle, bbc_radio_scotland, bbc_radio_ulster, bbc_radio_wales, or bbc_world_service. These feeds are used by the iPlayer web site and I have just tweaked them a little to give a full channel listing. Secondly, for podcasts, it is possible to get a full list of podcasts from either of the following (saves having to specify a list of channels in the Alien perl code): OPML: http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio/opml/bbc_podcast_opml.xml XML: http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/ppg.xml Thirdly, it has recently (this week) been discovered that you can now download/stream the BBC listen again stereo content in MP3 streams up to 192kbps (many are 128kbps and a few in 80kbps/mono). This is *significantly better* than the 64kbps real audio streams we've been limited to in the past. The method used for this simulates an iPhone but is really not that difficult to implement in perl. I have already coded this in perl for get_iplayer and it works like a dream :-) I've documented the Mp3 BBC listen again radio download method on the Beebhack wiki for those people who may want to look at this: http://beebhack.wikia.com/wiki/IPlayer_Radio#iPlayer_MP3_Radio_Streams My (bad perl code but lots of comments) get_iplayer software which has implemented this can be found at http://linuxcentre.net - Phil Lewis -- linuxcentre ------------------------------------------------------------------------ linuxcentre's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=20244 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=53171 _______________________________________________ plugins mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/plugins
