You can now watch the live feed from BP’s underwater robots as they try to plug the oil leak from Frank’s World.
How did I do this, you may ask? Did I send a little robot down to follow their robots around the sea floor?
As cool as it sounds, the answer is much, much simpler.
The other day, I noticed that BP’s live feed from the source of the oil spill was using a Windows Media stream.
A quick view-source on the page revealed the video source URL was:
http://mfile.akamai.com/97892/live/reflector:46245.asx?bkup=46260
I created a simple Silverlight project and inserted the following line of code:
1: <MediaElement Source="http://mfile.akamai.com/97892/live/reflector:46245.asx?bkup=46260" />
There you have it.
Unlike the WJLA live video feeds, the BP allows HTTP streaming. That’s why this works in Silverlight and I didn’t have to resort to using an XBAP like I did with the DC Traffic and Weather app.