Damian Mehers has developed a BBC Radio addin for Windows Media Center that enables listening of BBC Radio streams directly from the Media Center user interface. It’s a simple app that Damian originally developed for his own use and has made it available for free.
Some notes from Damian’s blog
- Your need Real Player installed
- You need version 3.5 of the .NET framework installed. It is available here if you don’t have it (or if you are not sure).
- It will not work with Extenders, since the BBC streams using Real Audio.
Read the post for more details
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Looks sweet. I assume this is (another) Vista only app?
yes it’s Vista only, MCE XP does not really provide the platform for these type of apps
A similar result can be achieved in XP by creating an MCL file that points directly to the Windows Media version of the BBC Radio streams. One MCL file per radio station that you want.
I’ve set this up myself for BBC Radio 1 (when I’m pretending to be young still) and for a couple of local commercial stations. I’ll fish out the MCL file when I’m home.
I’ve never figured out why, but these don’t seem to work on the extender either. Not sure why as the extenders are well capable of playing Windows Media audio. Instead it just displays the webpage and sits there silently.
PingBack from http://www.ditii.com/2008/07/17/beebmc-plugin-bbc-radio-for-media-center/
OK, slight delay!
To stream radio in XP MCE2005 just create an MCL file that looks something like this:
startimage="C:\Documents and Settings\
thumbnailimage=”C:\Documents and Settings\
description=”BBC Radio” category=”1″ companyname=”The BBC”>
(Note the GIF file is just a Radio 1 logo I downloaded from the BBC’s site – you’d need to do that yourself as well)
Save it in this folder: C:\Documents and Settings\\Start Menu\Programs\Accessories\Media Center\Media Center Programs\Radio
And that’s it. An icon will now appear in the Radio menu that will stream away happily. Other radio stations can be played by creating different MCL files, and modifying the URL as appropriate.
One advantage of this technique is that it uses the Windows Media streaming format from the BBC, so you don’t have to infect your machine with Real Player.
One problem, and why it’s pointless creating the MCL file in the All Users menu tree, is that this doesn’t work on extenders, well my 360 anyway. The icon appears. The web page will be browsed to. But it will just sit there silently. I suspect this is linked with an entry in the SDK that says “Media Center Extenders do not support the use of Windows Media server-side playlists for content streamed from the Internet.”
I’ve just updated BeebMC to support “Listen Again” so that you can listen to recently aired programs:
http://damianblog.wordpress.com/2008/07/31/beebmc-20-released-listen-again-supported/
/Damian