A screenscraping filesystem for accessing media archive

This is probably directly interesting to Norwegians since the content in question is in Norwegian, but the concept is so very cool. In Norway we have NRK the state broadcast corporation which has a very contemporary view on sharing its on content to the public. It is after all paid for by the people through taxes. And they have a rich library of media streams available on the net of mostly all television productions they created themselves.

I came across this little blogpost (in Norwegian) about Erlend Klakegg Bergheim’s effort to write a fuse filesystem which scrapes the archive web pages and creates a file system which you can mount as a regular file system on linux. Then just point your asx-capable media player (like vlc, mplayer, totem or kaffeine) to the “file” and play away. It is simply genius and ingeniously simple and makes browsing the content a breeze.

It’s written in python and chimes in at a 250 lines of code in total. The source is available at github:klakegg/nrkfs