How to get Internet radio working in MCE at a click of a button

Hi all,

Yesterday I have added some cool features to my MCE.

I have added an internet radios to it that can be accessed from the main menu. I live in UK and I like to listen to Czech radios that broadcast over the internet. I was looking to find an easy was of doing this from the MCE that sits in the living room.

I have faced a few problems and I thought it might be good to share it with the world.

First off you need an MCE Add-in to allow you to do this I have used this one called Web Media:

http://www.mcesoft.nl/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=25&Itemid=122

You have to register with them to be able to use it (just want your email that has to be valid)
It is a Media Release Candidate 1.3 but I tested it and it works quite well.

So once you download this and install it all you need to do is add the link to the live stream that is a *. Asx file

Now this might seem easy done but it isn’t. Usually any radio that uses windows media player that plays in a small popup window that is just an IE window or in some sort of player of its own. But once it opens you have no idea even about the URL of the page and especially not about the URL of the stream.

What you need now is a browser that supports Tabbed browsing (I have used Netscape 8 to do this)

You need to go to the site of the radio and then click on the link to LISTEN LIVE. What happens in Netscape is that the new window will open in a tab rather than in a pop up window. So now you see the URL of the page that plays the live stream but this still isn’t the URL of the stream itself.

You need to do view / Page source and look into the HTML code used to generate this language and if the page is using windows media player web control you can look at the code and locate this node:



Or just search the file for .asx and you will get the URL of the stream itself.

You can now use this as the URL of the internet radio station and add it to the Web Media in your MCE and there you go you can now listen to the internet radio from your MCE at a click of a (remote control) button.