Add NASA TV Feeds to Media Center

Care of Beullpilot on The Green Button forums comes this tip on getting NASA’s streaming TV feeds directly into your Media Center setup. The method is also surprisingly easy, simply download this zip file and add the contents to your video folder. You should now see the four NASA feeds from your Videos section in Media Center. Simple, effective and super geeky. What more do you want?

NASA TV Stream in Media Center

The quality obviously isn’t superb as it is an internet stream but the “neat” appeal for this little bit of work is definitely up there. This trick can be duplicated by downloading any ASX files from sites that stream Windows Media files.

Know of any other websites streaming in ASX? Let us all know in the comments section below!

7 comments:

Jon said...

Hmmm... nothing is showing up for me. What am I doing wrong?

MHealy said...

Make sure that you have placed the files in one of the folders in your video library. You can check which folders these are under Tasks > Manage Libraries. These won't appear under the movie libraries, only videos. They should appear under the same name as the file.

Jon said...

Thanks MHealy. So, I created a new folder under my photos and videos directory called NASA Stations, and tried to add that dir directly to my library... but it would not show up under Videos or Photos! Yet, they did show up under playlists in My Music!

So, I eventually moved that directory to one that was already indexed by videos, and then it showed up. Weird, eh?

Anonymous said...

Hmm, I never thought to use these shortcuts this way. There are thousands and thousands of feeds this will work with...including internet radio.
I used to use these links for some of my local radio stations. I'm going to go find the urls now.

Anonymous said...

Took me a while to remember how I did it...use a packet sniffer such as winpcap and open the wmp url you want to save.
Look for a ".asf" file. My local station "Rock 102 had an url of "http://72.26.207.26/3156-WMA-WAQY-FM-32?MSWMExt=.asf"

Now, open notepad and paste this into it...(replace brackets with carrots)


[ASX version="3"]
[Entry]
[ref href="your-url-here.asf" /]
[/Entry]
[/ASX]


Replace the url you found in the reference url entry, and save the file as "yourfilenamehere".asx

Open file to listen to your feed. Most feeds retain the same url indefinitely, but some randomize every time you open, so this method won't work in those cases.

MHealy said...

Thanks for the tip! I'll have to check out my local radio stations as well to see if they have similar streams up. I haden't even though of using this for radio before.

Anonymous said...

also works for mms streams.
Play the mms in WMP and save as .asx . Put it into your video folder. Now it will show up in Media Center.

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