I've discovered something rather cool for you documentary junkies out there. Using mplayer's support for streaming video, you can create playlist files for each of the frontline episodes hosted at http://frontline.org and play them like any other video.

Here's what I did:

An example 'Frontline - Rumsfeld's War'

1) Created file 'Frontline-Rumsfelds_war.pls' in my /myth/video directory and populated it with the urls for each segment:

mms://video.pbs.org/general/windows/med ... ch1_hi.wmv
mms://video.pbs.org/general/windows/med ... ch2_hi.wmv
mms://video.pbs.org/general/windows/med ... ch3_hi.wmv
mms://video.pbs.org/general/windows/med ... ch4_hi.wmv
mms://video.pbs.org/general/windows/med ... ch5_hi.wmv
mms://video.pbs.org/general/windows/med ... ch6_hi.wmv

You can get these URLs (you only need the first one since its easy to see how you come up with the following ones) by opening the site with Mplayerplug-in, right-clicking on the video and selecting 'Append URL to ~/playlist'. They follow a very consitent order as you can see above.

2) In MythTV, go to Utilities/Settings->Media Settings->Video Setup->File Types and create a file type called 'pls'. Make sure you set the command for "mplayer -fs -zoom -vo xv -cache 4096 -playlist %s".

3) Import your new Frontline playlist files to MythTV.

4) Go to your Video library and play. It will take a couple seconds to start (buffering) and will have 3-4 pauses during play when it switches between URLs in the playlist file.

Benefits include reasonable quality and the fact that you don't have to download or re-encode the videos (thus i'm fairly certain it's perfectly legal).

Enjoy!

I was in an episode of Frontline years ago... It was filmed when I was in boot camp. I'm still tryin g to find that episode....

_________________
cesman

When the source is open, the possibilities are endless!

If you know the show title/episode you can order it from PBS... Of course finding that may be the hard part...

I took a gander at the website earlier and it look like they don't have it. I contacted WGBH several years ago trying to find it.

_________________
cesman

When the source is open, the possibilities are endless!

Boston being Boston I'd be surprised if we didn't have someone here in the forums with an inside connections at WGBH... Post the episode title and/or air date and/or topic and/or any other identifying information you know and I'll bet we can find someone who knows how to find it...