[Please note, this post originally went out under the title of "Delicious TV", which happens to be a trademarked "property". If you're looking for delicioustv.com (is their DTV identifier also trademarked, I wonder?, which serves up the Totally Vegetarian public television show, you ned to go here. Sorry about that... ]
On of the things that I wanted to explore in the Digital Worlds online short course (T151 Digital worlds: designing games, creating alternative realities – registrations now open for October 2009 start;-) was how we might use Youtube video playlists as a way of pointing students towards an optional set of third party based video resources that could illustrate the various topics contained within the course. Here’s my first attempt how we might deliver such a service using Boxee…
On the original Digital Worlds uncourse blog I explored various ways of using Splashcast to provide a single point of access to video content. In part based on that, I came up with an ad hoc set of requirements for handling video content in a relaxed way;-)
- a browser based or multiplatform delivery interface that would allows users to watch video compilations on a TV/large screen in lean back mode;
- a way of curating content and generating hierarchical playlists in which a course could have a set of topics, and each topic could contain one or more videos or video playlists. Ideally, playlists should be able to contain other playlists.
As a precursor to this, I had a little tinker with Boxee last week to produce a UK HEI Boxee Channel. The recipe was quite simple, and using a list of UK HEI user pages on Youtube generated a channel on Boxee that would let you browse the recent uploads from each HEI.
The list of HEI Youtube pages was originally scraped from a table on a third party web page, but in a comment to the original post I also demonstrated how the recipe could also be used to create a Boxee channel feed from a delicious bookmark list. In particular, I linked to a channel of UK Media Youtube channels, a channel of UK Government Youtube channels and a channel on differential quations built up from separate OER playlists on Youtube. To view the channels in Boxee, grab the RSS feed from the appropriate channel pipe and then subscribe to it in Boxee as a video content feed.
Can you see where we might go with that approach? That is, with this: I also demonstrated how the recipe could also be used to create a Boxee channel feed from a delicious bookmark list…
Delicious TV Deli TV
How about using delicious as a way of curating video playlists and viewing them in Boxee? This would offer quite a large amount of flexibility: if a playlist was based on a tag feed, users could generate many different playlists; if a playlist could contain another (delicious) playlist, one user could build their own playlists that contained nested playlists (e.g. a course playlist could contain separate topic playlists, or a separate playlist for each week of the course) or even other peoples’ playlists; ‘live’ playlists could be copied from one user to another – that is, if my playlist bookmarked one of your playlists, any changes you made to that playlist would show up whenever I watched your channel; and so on…
So here it is – Delicious TV Deli TV:
Here’s what’s on one of my channels:
You may notice that the channel contains the following separate sorts of content:
- programmes listed in a BBC iPlayer category feed (e.g. BBC Satire);
- a podcast feed (Wiley and Downes in Discussion);
- a particular Youtube videos (New Model Army);
- a Youtube Playlist (MIT differential equations);
- recently uploaded videos to a particular user’s Youtube channel (the Guardian)l
- another Delicious TV playlist (psychemedia’s bookmarks).
(Not shown is a link to a particular programme on iPlayer, but that is also supported.)
So here’s how that channel was programmed:
Simply by bookmarking links to delicious…
To get started with your own Delicious TV Deli TV</em channel on Boxee, all you need is a Boxee account from Boxee.tv. Oh, and you’ll also need to download a Boxee client to your computer (Windows, Macs and Linux are all supported).
What next? That all depends on whether or not you have a delicious account…
If you do have an account on the delicious social bookmarking site then you will be able to programme your own Boxee channel by bookmarking programmes and playlists you your delicious account.
If you don’t have a delicious account, you can still programme a Delicious TV channel by subscribing to someone else’s delicious TV playlist in Boxee.
If you DO NOT have a delicious account:
Have a look at http://delicious.com/tag/delitv to see who’s been bookmarking Delicious TV Deli TV content on delicious. (For example, my Delicious TV Deli TV empire is based here: http://delicious.com/psychemedia/delitv ;-)
Use the name of the user whose Delicious TV Deli TV channel you want to subscribe to in the following URL:
http://pipes.yahoo.com/ouseful/delitv?_render=rss&q=DELICIOUS_USERNAME
So for example, my feed is at:
http://pipes.yahoo.com/ouseful/delitv?_render=rss&q=psychemedia
Subscribe to the URL in Boxee:
Now fire up your Boxee client, go to the pop-out Applications menu on the left hand side of the screen and select Video, then choose My Video Feeds:
You should now be able to view the Delicious TV Deli TV Channel you subscribed to.
If you DO have a delicious account:
The top level menu of your Boxee/Delicious TV Deli TV channel will contain those items you have tagged delitv in delicious.
Subscribe to the following Delicious TV Deli TV feed in Boxee:
http://pipes.yahoo.com/ouseful/delitv?_render=rss&q=DELICIOUS_USERNAME
where DELICIOUS_USERNAME is your delicious username.
At the current time, you can bookmark:
- a particular Youtube video
(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YC8Kk9nEM0Y); - a Youtube Playlist
(http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=11DBE3516825CD0F); - recently uploaded videos to a particular user’s Youtube channel (http://www.youtube.com/user/bisgovuk);
- programmes listed in a BBC iPlayer category feed
(e.g. http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/genres/drama/thriller); - another Delicious TV playlist
(http://delicious.com/psychemedia/t151boxeetest); - an MP3 file
(e.g. http://www.downes.ca/files/audio/downeswiley4.mp3); - a “podcast” playlist
(http://delicious.com/psychemedia/wileydownes+opened09).
If you bookmark another Delicious TV Deli TV feed, that will be rendered as a submenu in Boxee.
You can also bookmark other peoples Delicious TV Deli TV pages.
Feedback
If you run into any problems with Delicious TV Deli TV, please post a comment below. At the moment, Delicious TV Deli TV is very much in testing, so all feedback is welcome.
If you are outside the UK, then the BBC iPlayer links will not work for you. However, links to US based video streaming services may work for you (if you try them and they do, or don’t, please let me know via a comment below:-)
I haven’t tried the service with watch again content from ITV, Channel 4, or Channel 5 in the UK – anyone know if Boxee supports these yet (or is likely to in the near future?)
I don’t think Boxee has a mobile client, which is a shame; if anyone knows of a mobile video browser that can consume Boxee RSS feeds, please let me know… :-)
If anyone with a design flair would like to help me out with a the design for a simple homepage for Delicious TV Deli TV, a fully blown Delicious TV Deli TV Boxee app, please get in touch… :-)
If anyone is a patent troll who claims to have already got a monopoly over this sort of thing, f**k off – it was obvious and trivial given the current state of the tech and I didn’t need (indeed, I haven’t even seen) your crappy patent, in order to figure it out…
PS so why Delicious TV Deli TV? – So My Boxee “Delicious TV” Gets a Trademark Infringement Warning.
This looks great however I get no results from my delicious feed after tagging various videos and playlists with delitv – although yours works
Second, you can have a nice icon instead of hiding this under Vide Podcasts, add this to sources.xml – locate a delicious.tv PNG first
Delicious TV
rss://pipes.yahoo.com/ouseful/delitv?_render=rss&q=DELICIOUS_USERNAME
http://URL_OF_DELICIOUS_TV.png
false
Formatting lost, here is how your sources.xml entry should look
http://pastie.org/603013
@dave it can sometimes take a few minutes for delicious to propagate links to its RSS feeds. Yahoo pipes also caches for a short period, as do browsrs, computer operating systems, etc etc
Let me know if you continue to have problems with it…
Re the image – I don’t think I can inject the image into the Yahoo pipe feed. One thing I want to start looking at is how to produce full fat feeds for Boxee, that allow for background customisation, appropriate icons, etc etc.
thanks for the feedback :-)
tony
@Tony – ah yes delicious was being the problem works now.
Regarding the image, I don’t think I explained very well.
Rather than going to the Boxee website to add a feed you can edit your sources.xml – this means you can have a toplevel for deliciousTV rather than have it under Vodeo Podcasts.
the image is so that it looks pretty when navigating.
@Tony, thats so clean and graceful, took a little while for pipes to cache some content, but working fine here … delicious ‘crgmrgn’ …
How about setting the title in the RSS based on the userid (and/or tag), ie. Delicious TV:crgmrgn
Just with the existing three of four feeds its already confusing ;-)
Craig
@craig the only place i can set the title of the top level menu item (e.g. Delicious TV) is via the name of the pipe; so the custom workaround would be for you to clone the pipe and name it how you want…
Only that’s a crappy solution, so the workaround is just to have a single Delicious TV top level channel, and then bookmark several channels into it. So for example:
1) define a bespoke tag for each ‘major’ channel; e.g. delitv1, delitv2, etc;
2) for each major channel you want to subscribe to (e.g. delitv1, delitv2), bookmark the corresponding tag page in delicious, and tag it delitv. So for example, bookmark the page http://delicious.com/crgmrgn/delitv1, give it an appropriate title “Channel 1″ and tag it delitv.
3) if you want one of my channels as a ‘major channel’ in Delicious TV, bookmark my channel page – e.g. http://delicious.com/psychemedia/boxeetest5, title it (e.g. “Tony’s Demo Test Channel”), and tag it delitv.
I tried to simplify things as much as possible so that the user only ever needs to subscribe to a single Delicious TV feed URL, and thereafter they can programme their (single) Delicious TV Boxee metachannel from delicious.
Note also there’s an undocumented feature in the pipe: if you just put your delicious username into the pipe (e.g. crgmrgn) the Delicious TV channel will be rooted on crgmrgn/delitv (i.e. your bookmarks tagged ‘delitv’). You can override this by specifiying your own tag or tag combination, such as crgmrgn/mytv or crgmrgn/mytv+comedy
Hi – I am trying to clone your pipe but Yahoo won’t let me for some reason.
the problem I have is caching, the feed needs <boxee:expiry>
0
http://developer.boxee.tv/rss-specification/
or the feed won’t get updated until Boxee gets restarted
Doesn’t Boxee cache for 10 minutes by default, and then check the feed again? That was how I read the documentation.
On of the issues with using Yahoo pipes is that I don’t think you can get it to put arbitrary tags in the RSS. You can publish whatever attributes you like via the JSON output, but I *think* the RSS output is sanitised and doesn’t let many extensions through…
This is pure genius – I can see a lot of use in schools providing the LA’s would free up the feeds in. Wonderful – thank you!
Thanks for this guide :).
Basically, talking about videos, your pipes supports just youtube or am i missing something?
Is it difficult to open it to other video providers like vimeo, pbs or stuff like that.
Michele
Michele-
The pipe works well with Youtube, iPlayer and quite a few other providers, but it really depends on whether ot not there is a Boxee filter that can spot and play an embedded flash video file.
As and when I find thinhs that work, I try to remember to add them as a demo to:
http://delicious.com/psychemedia/boxeetest5
If I spot something that doesn’t work – and I remember – or find something that I haven’t yet tested, I add it to:
http://delicious.com/psychemedia/boxeetest6
Sometimes, different page views or URL tweaks make all the difference (eg iPlayer URLs with huiman readable stuff on the end break things in Boxee – so the DeliTV pipework just tides up the URI).
Just try bookmarking stuff into delicious and see if it works, maybe adding a comment here wrt URI patterns (including actual working example URIs) you’ve found that either do or don’t work in Boxee.
Innovative use of delicious bookmarks to create your own channels, like it.
I couldn’t get the single youtube vid to show up in the feed. I get ‘No results..’ message. It’s ok with the youtube playlists. I tried your playlist to check it wasn’t user error but same there. I think it was one of the F1 links was a direct link to a youtbe vid.
Thanks
Great read, thank you for sharing. I just thought i’d share this youtube video on watching tv channels online- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xp_pat6i_jo
Again, thank you, and I look forward to more posts from you!!
happy holidays!!
Thanks for the input on the Deli TV ,very nice.
Thx, very nice !!