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FRANCE 2 STREAMING NEWS SCRIPT

"France 2 News Streamer v0.2" by Liam & Steve

The French TV station France 2 has been kind enough to make its news broadcasts available on the internet. However, this has been done in a way that's not particularly friendly to non-Microsoft products which is why we have come up with this script which checks for the availability of the most recent news report and then plays it using mplayer.

We have had some problems getting this to work in older versions of mplayer but we can confirm that it works (for us, at least) using version 1.0pre6-3.3.5

The checking for the availability of an episode is done using mmsrip-0.6.0.

If it's useful to you to watch the news at a different speed (for example if your French isn't quite good enough to keep up with full-on high speed French), a speed parameter may be passed to this script eg.

$ f2 0.99

will play the news just a little bit slower.

If the most recent episode is not available, this script will keep searching back until it finds the most recent available episode.

So just start the script...

$ f2

Trying to find: 8h00 news, Wednesday 18/05/05
SUCCESS!

MPlayer 1.0pre6-3.3.5 (C) 2000-2004 MPlayer Team

...and when the news has finished, you'll get this friendly message:

*********************************************************

You have just been watching:
8h00 news, Wednesday 18/05/05

*********************************************************

:-)

Version 0.1 of our script used a patched version of mmsrip-0.4.2 to check for the availability of news reports. With version 0.2, it is no longer necessary to apply my patch as the author of mssrip has very helpfully added this functionality to version 0.6.0 of his program. This makes our script a lot easier to use - thanks Nicolas!