Canadian Stations

[acarr]

What information is needed to get Canadian video streams working?

 I know that ER (for example) shows here on CTV, and CTV has a video streaming app on their web site (ctv.ca) which works for Linux Flash (Ubuntu 8.10 at home...). Is there a way I can feed you information or you can document the process so I can get my wife's acceptance of a living room computer up?

Ideally, I should have a quick link to the current episode. Obviously, I will have to look through CTV's site a bit.

For that matter, is there a way to identify what information I need to feed to start to build ca.app.neuros.tv?

Cheers,
Angus.

[JoeBorn]

I'd love to test it myself, but unfortunately, I get errors trying to stream Canadian sites to the US.  I would be pretty surprised to hear that there was any problem.  We support flash 10, so I'm sure it's the same experience you've got on your Ubuntu box at home.  If I'm wrong and it doesn't work, we'll certainly pay return shipping if we can't get it working for you (since that would certainly be something we need to fix anyway)

WRT, ca.neuros.tv (or whatever permeutation) we're in the process of adding user contributions to it, and its on the list to filter by what's available to your IP address, so we are working on it.

[acarr]

In the end, I just made ctv.ca the default page on firefox, which skips the neuros.tv service entirely. That works for now, given that most of what we want is on there. There's a couple of shows on CBC, too, but other than that, I'm more or less ok for functionality. It would be nice to have a better interface... like the one at neuros.tv.

[jsdf]

acarr, as JoeBorn mentioned, we hope to make this a part of Neuros.TV in the coming months.  Please stay tuned!

[jsdf]

Is there a way I can feed you information or you can document the process so I can get my wife's acceptance of a living room computer up?
Ideally, I should have a quick link to the current episode. Obviously, I will have to look through CTV's site a bit.
For that matter, is there a way to identify what information I need to feed to start to build ca.app.neuros.tv?

Angus,
How would you see this working?
It could be anywhere from:
- You provide us with (or host?) a "translator" that scrapes pages/integrates RSS from CTV.ca, and we integrate your feed into our database?
- You help us build this into our codebase directly? (PHP/CodeIgniter experience required)?
- You provide individual links to shows through a Firefox browser button?  That way, your wife could help contribute too if she is so inclined

I'd love to hear your (and everyone else's) thoughts.

[JoeBorn]

How would you see this working?
It could be anywhere from:
- You provide us with (or host?) a "translator" that scrapes pages/integrates RSS from CTV.ca, and we integrate your feed into our database?
- You help us build this into our codebase directly? (PHP/CodeIgniter experience required)?
- You provide individual links to shows through a Firefox browser button?  That way, your wife could help contribute too if she is so inclined

I'd love to hear your (and everyone else's) thoughts.

I'm sure I wasn't included in the list of folks thoughts you were looking for, since you already know mine   but I'll put them here and try to rally support around it.  I think we need a simple tagging system something like delicious but for video (and centered around a tv show dbase instead of freeform tags)  Thoughts all?

[acarr]

If there was a preference on neuros.tv that knew I was in Canada (either by IP Address, or in a profile, or something like that) then search results available in Canada should be presented.

How do you get the feeds from nbc, abc, and cbs right now? Are you using a supported API, or are you scraping the websites?

I presently use a bookmark to CTV's streaming page, and run that. From using app.neuros.tv now to look for shows like ER, I happen to know that the site is available, but the video streaming isn't. I am able to find the episode, but not actually stream it.

Is the same thing true of Canadian TV? Perhaps you could employ the same methodologies to find shows, and then present them. If you can send me a script to test out here, then I can put in the right URL's, and see what it generates.

I presently bookmark http://www.ctv.ca/generic/generated/shows/AtoZ.html, which links to show pages with links like http://www.ctv.ca/mar/fragments/pipe/redirect905.html . The show page redirects to the current episode, at ttp://watch.ctv.ca/corner-gas/season-6/corner-gas-ep-608-rider-pride/#clip132736 . That looks much like the interfaces I can see from US networks.

I'd be happy to try to figure out what I can to help, but first I need to have a structure to hang things on, rather than starting at nothing.

Cheers,
Angus.