UPDATE 17 Jan 2007: BBC News has now changed it’s AV offering and as such the source material for these feeds is no longer being updated.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).
I’ve just finished the first of a series of scripts I’m working on, under the project name “Unofficial BBC News Labs”.
The first of these scripts is “BBC News AV Flattener”. In a nutshell it enables you to view the latest news from BBC News in Audio Video via light HTML pages rather than being forced into viewing them in the “BBC News Player”. There is also a syndication option via an RSS feed.
Many would argue that the official “BBC News Player”, being a frames-based proposition in a popup with HTML embedded player, is a little “backwards”. I couldn’t possibly comment, but what I will say is that I built the News and Sport players to meet the editorial requirements and overall departmental objectives I was given.
This is my opportunity to (begin to) offer what I what I would have produced given completely free reign of the editorial and graphic design brief. In particular, I am looking achieve something which focuses more on stripped-down-ultra-quick-access, better accessibility for those with assistive technology and syndication/news-reader uses (ie the rss feed)
The key benefit here is that you can view the media files in your native player rather than an HTML embedded console.
View the files I’m outputting (sorry, a nice index page is coming!)
Download the source file for the PHP script – GPL
Have fun, and let me know what you all think…
Disclaimer: This script is in no way connected to the BBC’s official output. Work produced on this script is strictly my own intellectual property produced in my own time, mingled with open source code from the open source community. All text, assets and news material are taken from the publicly available html and xml pages produced by BBC News Interactive. I make no guarantees for the accuracy, availability and timeliness of any of these services – on this front you will always be better served using the BBC News website directly.