[Anne]

would someone be interested in creating a script to access the pbs lehrer newshour feeds ?

--

i was just playing around with the video feeds of the (formerly macneil/)lehrer newshour as broadcasted on pbs.

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/newshour_index.html

i'm not sure how far back they go, but the 911 broadcast is still online, so they go back quite a long time.
[just checked: 1/1/2001 is also available]

what i found is that the url you can use is;
http://www.pbs.org/perl....20k.asf
this is for broadband (220k) windows media for the 26th of april 2005.

the 911 broadcast is;
http://www.pbs.org/perl....20k.asf

so basically the url is constructed as;
'http://www.pbs.org/perl/media.cgir?t=w&f...our/pbsnh' + <date in mmddyy format> + '_220k.asf'

alternatively two parameters can be added to this url;
&s= and &e=
i haven't figured out yet what the &s is for, but the &e= seems to influence the starting point of the stream.
unfortunately the archived streams do not start at the same point, so sometimes the broadcast starts with 5 minutes of 'advertisement', others start at the beginning of the newshour.

as i've never used python, i can't create a script for this feed myself and thus was wondering if someone who does master python would be interested in creating one.

personally i was thinking of showing a calendar which can be easely skipped through (skip days/months/years), with all dates where a feed is available selectable.

when a date is selected the corresponding url is created and the feed started.

my guess is that this shouldn't be to hard

for now i've write a small java app to run on my appserver to create a playlist of all available feeds each day and automatically upload this to one of my mediaservers.

btw; when opening the above mentioned url('s) i sometimes get an error that the feed can not be opened. trying a second time usually works then.

anne.

[bakman]

it seems like a huge number of streams, i am interested to create a script there is a but however (as always ):

personally i was thinking of showing a calendar which can be easely skipped through (skip days/months/years), with all dates where a feed is available selectable.

this is not possible, you will have to retrieve the date first (=fetching the page) before you can determine if there are feeds available. or we need to use a somekind of index file where we have the complete list of streams available and for new dates automatically check and append to this list.

the idea i have is: have 3 lists (day-month-year) + go button and 2 additional buttons: next day, previous day.
once pressing one of the buttons, you will get the list of topics for the particular day and a play button for the whole show (is there a need to play segments as well ?)

[Anne]

it seems like a huge number of streams, i am interested to create a script there is a but however (as always ):

personally i was thinking of showing a calendar which can be easely skipped through (skip days/months/years), with all dates where a feed is available selectable.

this is not possible, you will have to retrieve the date first (=fetching the page) before you can determine if there are feeds available. or we need to use a somekind of index file where we have the complete list of streams available and for new dates automatically check and append to this list.

the idea i have is: have 3 lists (day-month-year) + go button and 2 additional buttons: next day, previous day.
once pressing one of the buttons, you will get the list of topics for the particular day and a play button for the whole show (is there a need to play segments as well ?)

a bit of time has passed, but anyway

  personally i was thinking of showing a calendar which can be easely skipped through (skip days/months/years), with all dates where a feed is available selectable.

this is not possible, you will have to retrieve the date first before you can determine if there are feeds available.

i don't think you do.
as long as you make sure that only 'yesterday's' date and earlier is selectable (and not earlier than say 1/1/2000), you can assume that the feed is available, construct the url as described above and feed that to mplayer or whatever it is that makes streams play on the xbox

or is this to simplistic and am i overlooking something ?

anne.
[who also hasn't gotten around to writing a hkkp-java app to create .strm files for each day :]