8
December
2006
I do like to play around with things you know and even though wordpress allows me to create enclosures for my podcasts, I wanted to actually create my own podcast PHP scripts. This kind of stuff is fun!
For sometime now I’ve been working on a little project I’m calling podcreate, which is basically a set of quick and dirty scripts which actually get the job done very well indeed. The main aim is to loop around a directory looking for mp3 files, well in fact media files in general and build an array of items, which I can use to build RSS feeds with enclosure tags which hold information about the type and size of file and so on and can be used in podcatching software to automatically download those files. I cheated, the date of the podcast comes directly from the file name so there is a limitation on a file structure and that’s my excuse for not building ID3 tag reading in, which I know about.
The link below isn’t to my main podcast feed, because wordpress handles that for me:
Podcreate came about due to a couple of reasons, firstly a website which hosted audio downloads didn’t offer any podcast feeds, there was another site which didn’t offer any rss feeds at all so I set about screen scraping those sites and creating my own feeds, thus parsing their HTML and turning it into my XML, within the limits that has the scripts work well until the web master of one of those sites gets inconsistent with file names. Secondly I was recording episodes of Home and Away for one of my best friends on my PVR and I thought, hmm why not vidcast these episodes to him, save me buying some DVDs?
I have lots of fun doing stuff like this, take radioripper for example, which is a screen scraping script which will take a URL from the BBC listen again archives and produce some mplayer scripts for me, that will download a BBC radio show and transcode it to mp3. I love it!
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17
November
2006
Just dropping a short and sweet article on here to offer up some links to a mod of a GBPVR skin I worked on today. The RSSReader plugin allows a user to display RSS feeds, on their TV and has inbuilt ability to show items such as flickr photo streams.
However the skin I use, which is the excellent Nuoro, didn’t have support for the RSS plugin, so the interface wasn’t integrated very well, untill now. With no documentation I hacked this together, also hacking in a version for the widescreen sister version of Nuoro, which is called Sassari. They are really excellent skins and I hope these small downloads give users using either one of these skins the beauty of this really nice interface when reading RSS feeds on their TV.
Downloads
Screen one
Screen Two
NB: These are mods of the BlueMCE2 RSS skin by Danka, which have been integrated into Sassari and Nuoro, to install for Nuoro, simply extract the compressed files to the Nuoro skin directory, making sure they stay in a directory called “news”.
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26
October
2006
Recently I have bashed togther a windows based PVR system which records straight to Divx, which you can see in action here, that’s the background.
So yeah I was bored of getting up to use the keyboard to navigate around mplayer. So within five minutes I had a bluetooth HID (Human Interface Device) profile for my mobile phone, which maps the relevant phone keys to the computers keyboard. Quite niffty eh, who needs one of those pesky “one for all remotes” anyway?
You can download the hid profile here to try yourself, if you have Mplayer of course. You’ll have to bluetooth the file to your phone for best reults. I use the Sony Ericsson W810 walkman phone and the Belkin 10m bluetooth USB dongle, which actually still allows me to control mplayer from downstairs, even though the PC is upstairs!! Oh you may also need the screen image which is here.
Welcome to Lazy Town!
The joypad left and right jogs playback by 10 seconds, up and down by 60 seconds with the centre button being play/pause. Volume control is mapped to the phones erm, volume control buttons and there’s a range of niffty actions in there like playback speed of 4 times normal speed, the ability to go full screen, to cycle frame dropping modes, to bring up the OSD, to mark EDL points for advert breaks and the list is almost endless. Mplayer is extreamly flexible in its control, I just got tired of using the computer to control it that’s all. Hey it’s fun to play with stuff like this too.
The playback in GB-PVR is rubbish which is why I use mplayer, mainly because I know a heck of a lot of those little tricks you can do with filters and -vf this -ovc that.
Cutting out the adverts
It doesn’t stop there, oh no, I have a collection of mencoder scripts, which will to take a recorded TV show from a suitable PVR system (such as GB-PVR), set edit points to an EDL file when I press the ” i ” key, which I have to refine and clean up. The “chop” script can use the EDL file to skip over time periods, say from 300 seconds to 500 seconds, thus cutting out adverts it can then transcode and change the bitrate and aspect of that TV show and clean it up by adding blur or sharpen filters. Why do this? So I can cut out the adverts of course and set the aspect to work on a widescreen TV downstairs, when burned to a data DVD. Our DVD player can play Divx files and those scripts produce files which work in Windows Media Player as long as Divx is installed. It’s also nice to clean up file sizes and squish as much as possible onto a DVD.
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21
September
2006
This is a topic I will expand on in the future, it started when I wanted to create an enhaced podcast without Apples iTunes, which was compatible with every mp3 player out there. Currently as it stands creating an enhanced podcast in iTunes produces a file which cannot be played back on any device and takes away the universal compatability which allowed podcasting to rise to the levels it is at now, which was before iTunes came along.
Recently Mell over on the Glastonbury Podcast allowed me to send in an audio clip explaining how I looked at the alternatives such as the SMIL file format and even the BBC’s developments in inserting chapters into MP3 files. If you would like to hear my thoughts on this, head over to the Glastonbury site to download the podcast.
Here’s the rough example I was hand coding with SMIL, you’ll need Realplayer for the chapters to work as it does use non standard seek commands, but hey it works, would be ideal if I had a better solution for quicktime.
If by any chance you’ve come here from the Glastonbury Podcast, please do leave your thoughts here on this post, using the comment form below. Thank you for listening / reading and hopefully this willl be the basis of a service which may allow fellow podcasters to create their own non-iTunes enhanced podcast, with chapter markings and slideshows, maybe.
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