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Further improvements to my BBC News Audio Video RSS output

Published October 13, 2004 by Ben

UPDATE 17 Jan 2007: BBC News has now changed it’s AV offering and as such the source material for these feeds is no longer being updated. However these feeds have been deprecated for sometime, and you should check out the official BBC News AV RSS Feeds (click on the link, see the list of feeds on the right-hand-side column).

** UPDATE: I have re-instated the Broadband streams now that the BBC has fixed the problem of them “leaking” internationally. The BBC does not stream broadband media outside of the UK due to the cost of serving, and this is something which I respect. **

Following on from suggestions from my esteemed colleagues Ben W and Joel C (names obfuscated to protect the innocent) I’m now outputing a four RSS feeds per BBC News section – one feed per format/bandwidth combination available.

Previously I had four <link> nodes in each <item> node, to reflect the four media options per news story. Multiple <link> tags were causing havoc in many news-readers.

So, here are the new links you need (there’s an HTML flavour at the bottom too):

Broadband, Windows Media: (UK IP’s only)

Broadband, Real Media: (UK IP’s only)

Narrowband, Windows Media:

Narrowband, Real Media:

HTML Version – all media/bandwidth combos
Use this if you want to play BBC News clips in your preferred player (rather than in the embedded console)

I’ve also ensured I’m escaping safely all the characters I need to keep the XML valid.

Please do let me know if you are using these feeds, and any improvements you would like to see.

Published in BBC News Website dotBen Interactive Systems Tools Uncategorized

17 Comments

  1. Thomas Hawk Thomas Hawk

    Very cool. How about the closed captioned text? Can this be output and can it be crawled by a search engine to import closed captioned television text into the public search.

    November 5, 2004
  2. Matt Jones Matt Jones

    Hi Ben – have you thought about separating just the audio, and then perhaps using this ‘podcasting’ method to deliver me an ipod full o’ BBC News goodness everyday?

    I really like this – it’s integrated the Av into my news reading habits, and actually now I am starting to use the AV, whereas I almost never clicked on it on the site – also the duration infomation is really important for understanding what you have time to watch – gives me much mroe control. Great work!

    October 14, 2004
  3. nickh nickh

    could you mix them with the orininal text story feeds ?

    and the text in this textarea box on mozilla comes out tiny… arghhh

    October 14, 2004
  4. unmediated unmediated

    RSS feeds of BBC News Audio & Video
    Ben Metcalfe has generated RSS feeds of all the AV content that the BBC News site uploads by category.Very nice!…

    October 15, 2004
  5. Informationlab Informationlab

    BBC News Audio Video RSS output
    Ben Metcalfe filters out the audio and video content from BBC news and generates rss feeds by category.

    October 15, 2004
  6. roblog roblog

    A and V in RSS
    Hot on the heels of Stefan Magdalinski extending BBC News through hypermedia and conversation, now Ben Metcalfe is scraping for RSS feeds of the site’s video and audio (feeds here). Ben is a software engineer on the news and sport…

    October 15, 2004
  7. PommieBarsteward PommieBarsteward

    I understand why the Beeb has limited certain output to UK IP addresses but as an ex-pat Brit that now lives in Australia so I can’t help feeling slightly peeved as I happily paid my licence fee for nearly two decades. Could I assume that if I set up a proxy on my UK-hosted shell account that I would, ahem, solve this problem?

    Ben: No, because that would be illegal. Surely you can only expect your licence fee to only cover the TV/Radio that was produced and broadcast whilst you were paying it? Why don’t you subscribe to Real SuperPass – where you can access BBC News in broadband?

    June 3, 2005
  8. PommieBarsteward PommieBarsteward

    Hi, Ben,

    Thanks for taking the time to reply.

    As it happens, I do still pay a licence fee if somewhat indirectly (think monthly divorce payments and you’ll get my drift). As for Real, I’ll pass on that as I don’t allow their products on my machine due to their cavalier attitude to privacy. I’ll settle for the podcasts so that I can listen to BBC radio without all the usual problems associated with steaming media and a 56k dialup account.

    June 9, 2005
  10. Shantanu Ganguly Shantanu Ganguly

    I’m using these RSS feeds with a RSS module in Meedio to watch streaming news on my HTPC. I can even search for specific newsclips based on keywords.

    Thanks a lot for providing these feeds.

    July 25, 2005
  12. R Freeman R Freeman

    Thomas – The ‘closed captioning’ information, which in the UK is called subtitling, isn’t obtainable via these clips. The subtitles are added to the video as they are transmitted, but the clips you see have been grabbed before they have gone through that transmission process.

    PommieBar – why not try the ‘no nag’ version of RealPlayer which was made specially for the BBC?

    November 8, 2005
  14. stuart stuart

    Hi, any chance of a format that i can play back on my PSP? that would be awsome as the new system software allows for rss video playback. It would be realy cool to sit in a wifi hotspot and just download the news rather than getting a paper

    July 27, 2006
  15. Anon Anon

    Any chance of getting a direct link to the two-minute news summary?

    September 26, 2006
  17. Farzad Dehghani Farzad Dehghani

    Hi BBC.I like english language.so if its posible send for me BBC NEWS with subtitle.thanks alot.

    August 1, 2010

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