Wouldn’t it be handy if, as well as viewing DeliTV feeds in Boxee, you could also consume them on your phone? Well it just so happens that you can… :-)
Whilst messing around with Recent BBC/OU TV Programmes on Boxee, I noticed that my “OU on the BBC 7 Day CatchUp” code used in Recent OU Programmes on the BBC, via iPlayer (also available on iPhone: iPhone 7 Day OU Programme CatchUp, via BBC iPlayer) had broken. Whilst testing the fix on the iPhone/iPod Touch version, (which also works on a wifi link at least with my HTC Magic Android phone) it occurred to m that I should also be able to pipe DeliTV feeds to my phone, and then display them using the the iUI interface libraries too…
So a little bit of tweaking of my OU 7 day catchup code, and couple of extra handlers to wrap the DeliTV (for Boxee) pipe, and what do we get? (Images grabbed from iPhoney on a Mac.)
You can play along here: http://ouseful.open.ac.uk/i/idelitv.php (for a QR code of the URL, see here.)
A clunky homepage…
Leads to the default DeliTV multiplex (psychemedia/boxeetest5):
[You can configure the app to run with your own DeliTV mutliplex:
http://ouseful.open.ac.uk/i/idelitv.php?q=YOURMUTLIPLEX
So e.g. http://ouseful.open.ac.uk/i/idelitv.php?q=psychemedia/delitv_f1 ; or http://ouseful.open.ac.uk/i/idelitv.php?q=psychemedia for my default “delitv” multiplex.]
http://ouseful.open.ac.uk/i/idelitv.php
Here’s the UK Politics suite of channels:
(Note that the page may take some time to load; when I get a chance, I’ll add a loading indicator in…)
If we go into the Political Parties list, and click through on the Liberal Democrats link, we get a list of actual videos:
Clicking through on those takes you to the video page:
And clicking the Watch this video link will play the video for you using whatever your mobile device allows.
Whilst the Youtube content is workingm the iPlayer content is not working – yet. I think the original 7 day catchup had to use a helper for BBC URLs (I seem to remember that iUI doesn’t like BBC mobile URLs), and I haven’t had chance to work it in yet…
Anyway – what does this all tell us? That feeds are a Good Thing, of course…! ;-)
It also means that if you create a hierarchical playlist of Youtube content, at least, that maybe includes curated lists managed by other people, you can watch the content either in Boxee, or on your mobile device.
So that’s the proof of concept done… but as is the way of these things, it needs proper apps building to make it shiny and robust enough, and with a friendly and intuitive UI, to be used on a casual basis by anyone not me… ;-)
