UK HEI Boxee Channel

A week or so ago, Liz Azyan posted a list of UK HEI Youtube channels. Although not quite as polished as @liamgh et al’s OU Boxee app, I piucked up on a couple of suggestions Liam made over a pint last night about simply subscribing to an RSS feed in Boxee to roll my own UK HEI Youtube Boxee channel thing…

So here are the institutional channels:

and here’s a peek inside one of them:

This lets me watch the most recently uploaded videos to all (?) the UK HEIs’ most recent uploads to their Youtube channels, organised by institution via a lean back TV interface.

(You might be able to submenu the institutional channels/streams according to playlists they have specified, as well as tidying up things like icons/logos, maybe, but this was a 10 minute hack, rather than a half hour hack, ok?!;-)

Here’s the recipe…

1. Grab the table from Liz’s web page and create a feed from it:

2. Generate the feed URIs for the most recent uploads to each channel (in the form required by Boxe – e.g. rss://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/base/users/abertayTV/uploads?alt=rss&v=2&orderby=published):

Filter out stuff that isn’t a feed and complete the pipe:

We can now grab the RSS feed from the pipe in the normal way and subscribe to it via a personal account on the Boxee website.

If you now launch the Boxee app, select:

– Video:

– Internet

– Video Feeds (My Feeds)

– the UK HEI Youtube Videos Channel

And from there, you should be able to browse – and play – the recent uploads to all the UK HEI Youtube channels that Liz has listed.

Not that I had a niggle with my Boxe player – I could hear the audio but not see the video for any of the Youtube videos when I tried to play them. If anyone else tries out this channel and gts the same problem, please let me know and I;ll see if it’s a feed problem. Otherwise, I’ll assume it’s a local glitch…

Here’s the RSS feed URI again: “UK HEI Youtube Channels on Boxee” RSS feed

PS out of interest, if I had bid to do this as a #jiscri project, how much should I have asked for?
– planning: 10 mins chatting with Liam over a pint ysterday;
– design: <5 mins looking up Youtube API/URI patterns
– implementation:: <5 mins creating Yahoo pipe
– configuration: <5 mins subscribing to the pipe feed in Boxee
– testing: <5 mins seeing if it worked in Boxee (which it doesn’t, properly, but I’m blaming that on a local problem and trustung that it does actually work… err…?!;-)
Okay, so all told it was maybe a sub-20 minute hack rather than 5 minute one?
– documentation: (i.e. blog post) 30-45 mins, incl grabbing screenshots.

And I’m on holiday today…