Watch the NBC Nightly News netcast full-screen

Since my MythTV machine went on the fritz, I have been trying to cobble together the viewing of all of my shows in an ad-hoc manner. For some, I am using iTunes, others are going to the "poor-man's Tivo" (i.e. my VCR). And of course, BitTorrent is playing a role.

For the NBC Nightly News, however, I decided to check out their "netcast". Every night, around 2 hours after the news airs, NBC makes a steaming version available on their website. Normally, this is viewed in the browser, via a MS Media Player plugin. Thus, when viewed via a plugin, you are stuck with the size of the video. It's not resizable or anything.

However, if you use the MS Media Player client, then you have access to all of the controls, including fullscreen viewing. To get this going on my PowerBook, I had to wade through a bunch of obfunscated HTML and JavaScript, before I found the "magic" URL that the Nightly News website was loading for the video.

To access the NBC Nightly News netcast directly, you need to use a URL of the following form:

Note that the above URL as it stands will not work. You have to do a substitution for the YYMMDD part (where YY is the two-digit year, MM is the month, and DD is the day, all in digits), to get the URL for the exact day of the news that you want to watch.

So for example, to watch this evening's news, I formed the following URL:

You can see that I constructed a date of '06' (for the year 2006), '05' (for the month of May), and '11' (for the day of the month). Just enter that URL into the "open location" dialog in your Windows Media Player (or free equivalent), and you should be all set!

-Andy.

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