If you are living in the United Kingdom, have a broadband Internet connection and are at least 16 years of age you can apply to become a beta tester for the BBC Archive. The BBC is looking for 20000 testers that use the system for a period of six months exploring the vast archive that will be available for download (probably mean streaming). Testers will have to take surveys from time to time to improve the service during the test.

“The pilot is part of the BBC’s plans to eventually offer more than a million hours of TV and radio from its archive. Our audience increasingly want and expect to dictate how, when and where they get our services,” he told the conference.” said BBC’s Future Media boss Ashley Highfield. He said the corporation’s end ambition was “one day enabling any viewer to access any BBC programme ever broadcast via their television”, and highlighted the need to bridge the divide between TV and content with online connections.

continue reading "BBC Opens up Archives. Looking for Testers"

The following website contains links to 17992 tv show episodes, 5151 cartoon series, 2582 movies, 12235 anime shows, 5741 music videos and 957 sports clips. It is called Alluc and could be described as a link aggregator for video websites. All it does is that it offers the users of the website a opportunity to post new links to videos that they found on various social video websites such as youtube or dailymotion.

Links are added immediately to the database and everyone will be able to search for and use the links to visit the website and view the video. Page navigation is fast and easy to comprehend. Click on a category like TV-shows and all TV-shows are displayed on the next page. It starts in this case with 15 storey high and 30 rock and ends with young Americans. I would estimate that they currently list about 400-500 tv-shows.

continue reading "Incredible Video Links Website"

It seems that someone found out a way to create download links to the mp3 files that one can listen to on the profile pages of the bands that have a myspace website. The script to decode the myspace url and extract the mp3 links is working well and uses Ajax for ease of use.

All you need to to is supply a website or profile page of a band and the script automatically decodes the information and displays links to all songs that can be listened to on the website. Myspace randomly generates the links every minute which means that sometimes the decode button has to be pressed more often than once.

continue reading "How to Download Songs from Myspace"

I was contacted by the creators of the famous Democracy Player to test drive the upcoming Democracy Player 0.9.5 which is scheduled for release this Wednesday. The most important features that will be introduced in this new version are pausing and resuming of downloads, submit buttons to digg, del.icio.us and reddit, proxy support and an interface redesign.

Democracy Player is not just a video player with support for most video formats such as divx and quicktime mov but also incorporates the internet with so called channels that use video feeds, rss channels, podcasts and video blogs which are sorted in categories like Comedy, Politics and Technology.

continue reading "Test Driving Democracy Player 0.9.5"

One of the blogs that I’m regularly visiting is Connected Internet created by my friend Everton Blair. He writes mainly about the same topics that I write about (with a slight British touch) and once in a while I find a interesting story that I would like to write about at ghacks as well. He discovered a automatic playlist generator for iTunes called The Filter.

Let me explain how this works. Once installed you either choose to register an account or connect anonymously, I’ve chosen the second option. The filter starts up iTunes and all you need to do is select a few songs that you like at the moment. Once you have selected a few you click on the F in the filter toolbar and the plugin seeks for additional songs that fit the selected ones.

continue reading "Create Automatic iTunes Playlists with the Filter"