29 Sep 2008
Whilst you're waiting for me to get my act together, you might find it useful to have a look round on the iPlayer Real Converter site. It's doing pretty much what I intended to do - creating a directory of Real Audio links from the iPlayer data.
It all looks rather nice.
23 Sep 2008
Time for an update. I'm sorry that things are taking so long.
I have a first draft of the new software to extract the broadcast data. I'm just a bit caught up on using that to publish the new pages. Won't be long now though. Perhaps a couple of weeks.
31 Jul 2008
Hmm... things have gone a bit strange today. The starting point that I use for grabbing this data is here. You'll notice that most of the radio stations have vanished from there. Which means that most of the stations have vanished from this site too.
I think that my source page has fallen out of favour given the introduction of the new version of the Radio iPlayer and it's no longer kept up to date. I suspect that I can pull the data I need together from other sources (perhaps the iPlayer itself) but that's going to involve me finding some spare time that I don't really have currently.
So keep watching this page for information about what is happening, but in the meantime,why not try using the Radio iPlayer instead.
13 Dec 2007
The BBC Radio Player is no more. The Listen Again streams have been integrated into the iPlayer. See here for details.
It looks to me as if everything works as well as it used to, but I'll be taking a closer look at it over the next few days.
It might even be that the BBC have finally produced a decent catalogue of their radio streams which would render these pages redundant. I'll let you know.
10 Oct 2007
As part of the recent server move, it seems I also managed to break the Real Player links. Thanks to Alan Torchinsky for pointing it out.
Still working on fixing the automated build tho'.
2 Oct 2007
I've moved this site to a new web server. I thought that I had got the automated nightly rebuild of the streams pages working, but it looks like I was mistaken as the new pages didn't appear this morning.
I'll look into the problem as soon as I can, but it might be a day or two. Please bear with me. Apologies for the inconvenience.
28 Feb 2007
I keep meaning to get round to writing a FAQ for these pages but I never seem to have the time. Until I do I wanted to point out a few things:
Slight redesign overnight. It was pointed out to me that screenreading browsers (as used by blind people) would have a much better chance of understanding my pages if I made better use of HTML header records. I'm embarassed that I hadn't thought of it myself, but a big thanks to Jonathan Mosen for bringing it to my attention.
I've finally got round to automating the rebuild of the pages. You should now see new pages appearing each day at about 6am.
Let me know if you see any problems.
Ok, here's the new version of the page.
Yes, you'll see that things have changed significantly and yes I've removed some of the links. This is because of an off the record discussion that I had with the man from the BBC. He explained the reasons why they don't provide direct Real Player links for music shows (it's all to do with the perfidious rewind button) and I agreed to provide only the same links that they do (tho', I hope, in an easier to navigate format).
Hopefully, by removing the extra links, I have made it easier for the BBC to negotiate with various other parties so that they are eventually able to provide all of the links themselves.
In case it's not clear to anyone, I haven't been closed down, lent on or threatened with legal action. These changes are completely down to me, following a discussion with the BBC. Sometimes you have to give a bit of ground in order to win back a lot more in the future.
Note: Please don't email me asking for older versions of the pages (I don't keep backups) or for "just one stream URL" (I don't fancy becoming a manual search engine). Instead why not try seeing what you can learn from viewing the source of the BBC Radio Player pages.
As you'll see, I've split each station out in to a separate page. The list was getting too long and becoming unmanageable. I think this approach works much better.
I've also included a link to the YAML file at the bottom of this page, you might want to take a look at that rather than running get_streams yourself. I suppose that means I should document the data structure at some point...
By the way, I'm watching Backstage with great interest. Maybe something will come out of it that will mean I don't have to screenscrape this stuff.
As always, I'm interested in hearing any comments or suggestions. My email address is at the bottom of the page.
Oh, and sorry about the reappearance of the the Google ads. Bandwidth costs money.
Cheers, Dave...
Generated at 02 Dec 2008, 05:31:18
Generated by get_streams
raw data (yaml)
dave@dave.org.uk