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!).

Christmas is upon us once again and inevitably many people will be thinking about what to enjoy on television as they recover from all of that food and drink! So in my last blog post for this year I thought I would experiment with MythStream, a plugin for MythTV which is a multimedia home entertainment system designed for PCs that are connected to your TV and you operate with a remote control rather than the traditional laptop and desktop experience of computing. In my last post the Open University's new podcast website was brought inside Miro, but in this example, information will be extracted from it to integrate it with MythStream and MythTV so you can enjoy the content of the site from your armchair. The OU's podcast site uses a hierarchical navigational structure that made it a bit difficult to import the whole thing into MythStream straight away. Fortunately, MythStream enables you to write your own parsers for external websites, so you can import the same navigational logic, even if it is not supported out of the box.