New App: PBS Video

[jlr1001]

I noticed the other day that PBS is running a beta site where it's streaming full-length episodes of some of its top shows. So I decided to make a quick rss app for it.

Repo: http://www.viralnarrative.com/boxee or you can find it through fuzz's all-in-one repo.

Please note that their site is in beta, so I've found that video streaming can be spotty at times. This is even the case if you go directly to their site--occasionally their own player will start a video then redirect to a "you've just watched..." screen, even though nothing played. Hopefully this will be sorted out soon.

To-do:

- Add the "Topics" and "Collections" sections
- Add other PBS programming that's not part of the beta site
- Add javascript to activate the player controls

Enjoy!



-J.L.

[marcel]

very nice...:)

[bmoura]

I noticed the other day that PBS is running a beta site where it's streaming full-length episodes of some of its top shows. So I decided to make a quick rss app for it.

Repo: http://www.viralnarrative.com/boxee or you can find it through fuzz's all-in-one repo.

-J.L.

Good job.

Looks like PBS is gradually adding all of their programs to the site. In fact, they now have a "more videos" link at http://video.pbs.org/morevideos.html with more of their shows.

[DPK]

I wish they would add more of their home improvement show episodes, like This Old House. Not just clips.

[jlr1001]

Looks like PBS is gradually adding all of their programs to the site. In fact, they now have a "more videos" link at http://video.pbs.org/morevideos.html with more of their shows.

Thanks!

And the shows on the other side of that link are what I meant by "adding other programming". However, I have to wonder if the best strategy is to go ahead and add these now, or wait for them to be aggregated on the main site.

And DPK, it is a shame that TOH doesn't put full episodes online. Maybe they will with this new PBS Video initiative.



-J.L.

[bmoura]

Thanks!

And the shows on the other side of that link are what I meant by "adding other programming". However, I have to wonder if the best strategy is to go ahead and add these now, or wait for them to be aggregated on the main site.

And DPK, it is a shame that TOH doesn't put full episodes online. Maybe they will with this new PBS Video initiative.



-J.L.

If the addresses of the feeds are going to move, you're right. Probably best to wait.

For me, some of the local station content like Quest are the episodes to really wait for !

[SorryGoFish]

This is fantastic, thank you so much. If it's possible, it would be nice to see the length of the clip / episode in the brief description. In any event, this is exactly what I was looking for, thank you very much.

[jlr1001]

I'm glad you dig the app. The descriptions are being pulled from the info PBS supplies. I'll have to look at the data in the rss feed I'm creating to see if there's runtime info supplied.

If so, I'll try and add it... though, to be honest, I don't recall seeing information on the episodes length.



-J.L.

[SorryGoFish]

Anybody else notice that if you pause the stream you can never get the HUD buttons / info do disappear? I'm also unable to seek, but can't seek in YouTube either so I guess this is a problem with the backed flash player. Anybody know of a workaround for either of these problems?

[jlr1001]

Honestly, I didn't even know that pause was working...

Have you tried hitting the escape key? Also I've had this happen to me before (in other apps) and I've just pressed enter or "i" depending on how I was bringing up the UI, and then it would disappear... almost as though I had to refocus the UI so that Boxee "remembered" to make it disappear.

Not being able to seek is a known issue. I haven't had the chance to analyze the PBS player's stream to see if I can create a javascript file to allow Boxee to control the player. Once I do this, assuming I'm successful, I'll post an update here.

Oh, btw, what YouTube content are you watching? The reason I ask is that the content streamed via the YouTube Movies app I created allows me to seek and pause. I want to believe that all YT content has allowed this... so I was surprised that you're having issues with that.



-J.L.

[SorryGoFish]

Actually, I'm using the L8R app. I guess it'll bring up YouTube movies, but isn't using the proper JS code. I'll post over there. Thanks.