netvibes - (re)mix the web

Not everyone knows it, but you can access and control the internal podcast player using UWA - and we’ll show you how in this very article.

The example used here is the excellent Web Radio Player widget, built by Maurice Svay and which lets you play audio streams in MP3 format from the renown ShoutCast service.

When installed in Netvibes, it uses the Netvibes podcast player, which is also used when you listen to an audio stream from a podcast feed that you added to your Netvibes page. As advertised, on platforms other than Netvibes, the widget will let you play radios with your favorite desktop player: Winamp, Windows Media Player, iTunes, etc. - basically any player that supports .mp3 files (or .pls files, since this widget cleverly parses them to send the .mp3 to the podcast player). So your widget is not limited to Netvibes!

Obviously we won’t dissect the whole source code here, that would require and go directly to the code related to the podcast player, which consists simply of a call to one method:

AudioPlayer.play(streamURL, 'Name of the stream');

This method triggers the launch of the podcast player. To be a little cleaner, the code first check for the presence of the AudioPlayer.play method before even launching the Ajax request that fetch the steam and launching AudioPlayer.play. Here is an overview of how Maurice does it:

Radio.parseList = function(text){
  // code that fetches and displays
  // every station of the PLS file as a link
  if (AudioPlayer.play){
    Radio.loadStation(this.href);
    return false;
    }
  // HTML generation
  }

Radio.loadStation = function(url){
  UWA.Data.getText(url, Radio.playStation);
  }
Radio.playStation = function(text){
  // Data handling
  AudioPlayer.play(playableStream, 'Web Radio Player');
  }

play is not the only method available! AudioPlayer also gives you access to pause and stop, if you ever want to fully control the podcast player from within your widget. Learn all about it on the documentation page for the AudioPlayer objet!

Tags: audioplayer, javascript, netvibes, uwa

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 22nd, 2007 at 6:43 pm and is filed under Articles, Tutorials. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.