Back in December 2008 I wrote a small perl script to enable you to enjoy podcasts from the Open University in MythStream, an add on for MythTV that enables you to watch streaming video content through MythTV. The OU's podcasts site has a number of RSS feeds that relate to the varioud subject areas that the podcasts covered and to a number of containing sections like OU Life and OU Research. At the time the script was written there was no easy overall way to autodiscover all of these feeds and tie them together, so I wrote a bit of code that would work this out from the menu rendered on the right hand side. This sort of screen scraping technique is great as a short term way to get the data we need, but the problem is that it is using output that was intended for a human to read rather than a machine to process. This sort of process can easily break if the layout of the page changes. To solve this problem I've been working with Chris Valentine of the Knowledge Media Institite at the OU who has kindly provided a better way to extract this information (many thanks Chris!).

The Open University here in the UK regularly coproduces educational programming in partnership with the BBC. Some of these programmes are for a wide audience such as Coast, and other programmes are for more specialist audiences such as The Story of Maths. To catch these programmes you don't have to necessarily stay in and make sure that you are sat on your sofa in front of the TV at a scheduled time, instead you can catch the repeats on BBC iPlayer (sorry - UK, IoM & Channel Islands only). My colleague Tony Hirst recently created a mash up to find the OU programmes from the last seven days posted to iPlayer using feeds from Twitter, iPlayer and a Yahoo Pipe, he then presented the results in a web page. When looking at his blog post on this it struck me that it would be really nice if this could be presented in a way more suitable for a media centre PC connected to a TV, so this would mean nice big fonts, an attractive interactive-TV type interface and ease of use from a remote control, and then I thought it would be even better to feed this into MythTV, integrating seven days of OU programming alongside the rest of your entertainment.