2008 Olympics

[coryking]

Well, this year it looks like NBC will be offering about a bazillion hours of streaming video coving the more bizzare (read: cool) sports that typically are not covered on TV. Now, I'm all for that, but quite frankly, I have no interesting in watching video content on my computer or laptop.

MSNBC does not offer these videos as podcasts and their RSS feeds do not link or point to the video file itself.

I realize this isn't a SageTV "problem", but the ability to somehow suck up video content not direclty linked via RSS would be a huge feature. For example, MBNBC also has lots of extended political inverviews and re-broadcasts of their political shows that are not offered by podcast but as embedded video.

Surely somebody, somewhere, can cook up an add-in that would suck in these videos so I can watch them from the comfort of my couch, not a computer chair.

[wayner]

Originally Posted by coryking

Surely somebody, somewhere, can cook up an add-in that would suck in these videos so I can watch them from the comfort of my couch, not a computer chair.

What's stopping you from doing this today? Sure you can't watch the videos from within Sage but if you have an HTPC then you already are watching your computer from your couch. Add a wireless keyboard/mouse combo and you can easily run any app from your couch.

[mayamaniac]

Originally Posted by wayner

What's stopping you from doing this today? Sure you can't watch the videos from within Sage but if you have an HTPC then you already are watching your computer from your couch. Add a wireless keyboard/mouse combo and you can easily run any app from your couch.

I think a lot of us moved away from HTPCs (PC Clients) after the HD extenders were released.

Maybe we should start a "bribe" system where we donate money to a trusted source, maybe to Opus4, assuming he can be trusted, but then he lives in NJ so I don't know.

... Anyway, then we vote on what feature/plugin/addon we like to have in SageTV. And the developer that delivers it first will get the money, whatever the amount is at the time it is delivered. Official SageTV developers can also win the money if they releae the requested feature first.

For example, let say I want an "Auto Downloader for videos in Online Services" feature, I can donate $25. If someone else want the same features and willing to donate, then they can donate whatever amount they want. So with enough people donating, the bounty for this feature can get really high and maybe it will persuade some developers to tackle it.

Just a thought ...

[coryking]

You are right about bailing out of SageTV and running the nbc video client fullscreen. The only problem is getting the remote working with it, which is to me a big issue (WAF and laziness).

I think what we are seeing is the early stages of "mainstream" online video. Hopefully by the winter Olympics there will be a more standard way to hook online video into programs like SageTV. Dont forget that NBC is MSNBC and they have Media Center. I'm sure Microsoft would love to have all 3600 hours of online video playable in their media center too.

I suspect one of the primary reasons this is not happening already is advertising. Until you can force SageTV and others to watch an advertisement prior to the real video like you can with a embedded web player (not to mention wrap the player with banner ads), it just wouldn't pay off.

Another reason, I suspect, is big media companies like NBC are still living in the past. They made deals with all the cable compaines and if you dont live in the right zip code, you cannot watch certian online videos. Lets not even forget the 12 hour tape delay of the opening cerimonies...

For now, the best way we can get these videos embedded is to use their RSS feeds, fetch the web page with the video and then scrape it for the video file. Something tells me they thought of this already and make it pretty difficult.

[dpackham]

Check out the TVTonic Olympic plugin. if we could get that to work

http://tvtonic.com/

Dave P

[lobosrul]

Originally Posted by coryking

Dont forget that NBC is MSNBC and they have Media Center. I'm sure Microsoft would love to have all 3600 hours of online video playable in their media center too.

Actually, NBC is NBC Universal, which is 80% owned by GE, and 20% by Vivendi. Just the channel MSNBC is a joint venture between NBC Universal & Microsoft.

[coryking]

Originally Posted by lobosrul

Just the channel MSNBC is a joint venture between NBC Universal & Microsoft.

Didn't know know, thanks. They are still in bed on some level if NBC as a whole is using silverlight over flash for their online videos.

I think "the solution" would be to allow us to create plug-ins that can embed Silverlight & Flash. Speaking as a developer, I suspect the big reason this hasn't been done is neither is well supported on Linux (yet). Worse, I dont know how it would work with the media extender (unless you could port the Mono framework over . At the top level, I don't know how to create a bridge between .NET and Java.

Ah well... one can always dream, right? My dream has alway been to get SageTV to work with something like the World Wide Telescope (http://www.worldwidetelescope.org) to work. Wouldn't it be sweet to zoom in and out of the universe from the comfort of your couch?

[davephan]

You might try using "Downloadhelper", which is a free Firefox plug-in. The plug-in allows you to save video streams in the FLV format. You can then playback the saved video streams with a media extender. The "Downloadhelper" free plug-in does not work with all streams, but there are other programs that are not free, but fairly low-cost, that claim to save all video streams.

Dave