TV: May 2006 Archives
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.
Technorati Tags: NBC Nightly News
I just say that Apple has finally done a deal with Fox, and now some current Fox shows, as well as "classics" like Buffy and Firefly (how can a mistreated and abused TV show become a classic? Hmmm...).
This is great news. The more exposure there is to Firefly, the better. I have spent the last several weeks re-watching all of the episodes (making sure that Kevin has seen them all), and that show is just simply amazing. And apparently, the show is still selling well on DVD for Fox. Hopefully, being on iTunes will perk those numbers up even more.
-Andy.
Technorati Tags: Apple, Firefly, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, iTunes
As all of the TV fans in America are aware -- we are coming up to the end of the regular TV viewing season, when all of the dangling threads will be wrapped up, resolutions made, and the cliffhangers engaged to keep us all on the edge of our seats throughout the summer.
Which, of course, makes it a perfect time for the Seagate hard drive in my MythTV machine to give up the ghost. Which is apparently what it did sometime on Monday, while Mike and I were driving back from Coachella. The geek tax strikes again.
Of course, I didn't notice until last night, when Kevin and I sat down in front of the boob-toob in order to watch "Gilmore Girls". Amazingly, the MythTV front-end program was still working, but no new content had gotten recorded. And when I tried to investigate, I saw that Linux was encountering massive errors while going to and from the disk.
So, it looks like I'll have to replace it. But before I can get to that, TV must still be watched! I had to resort to BitTorrent for the things that my MythTV machine was supposed to record but didn't, and I have bought a multi pass of the Daily Show on iTunes. For everything else, I will fall back on my "poor man's PVR" -- i.e., my VCR.
-Andy.
Technorati Tags: Open Source, MythTV, Geek Tax
