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Shall we start a small brainstorm?

What should be a proper way to describe (in pseudo-XML) all the various content available?

I can imagine the following "dividers":

-video, audio

-station or finite stream (could one consider a finite stream, such as podcast, TV programs archive etc. as a "remote recording"

-language

-country?

-some handling of bitrates, various streams provided for various speeds of interent connection

-some favourites handling

-genre?

And the folowing metadata:

-Picture url

-Maybe something about the availabitlity of EPG's, a lot of foreign stations are available as stream and have some site where their EPG's can be grabbed -> might be usefull for intergration in MyTV once?

-lenght of the program

So that leads to some syntax, here an example for NASA's TV:

<list>

<section name="0">

    <entry name="INDEX">0</entry>

    <entry name="AV">Video</entry>

    <entry name="type">netstation</entry> (versus netprogram)

    <entry name="Number">0</entry> for custom sortings

    <entry name="Name">NASA TV</entry>

    <entry name="Country">USA</entry>

    <entry name="Language">English</entry>

    <entry name="Picture">http://www.nasa.gov/templateimages/template/footer/logo_nasa.gif</entry>

    <section name="EPG"></EPG>

    <section name="source">

       <section name="asx">

          <entry name="Minbitrate">0</entry>

          <entry name="Maxbitrate">0</entry>

          <entry name="Address">http://www.nasa.gov/55644main_NASATV_Windows.asx</entry>   

       </section>

       <section name="rm">

          <entry name="Minbitrate">0</entry>

          <entry name="Maxbitrate">0</entry>

          <entry name="Address">http://www.nasa.gov/ram/35037main_portal.ram</entry>

       </section>

       <section name="alternate">

          <entry name="Name">NASA TV Captioned</entry>

          <section name="rm">

             <entry name="Minbitrate">0</entry>

             <entry name="Maxbitrate">0</entry>

             <entry name="Address">http://www.nasa.gov/ram/35037main_portal.ram</entry>

          </section>

       </section>

    </section>

    <entry name="Isfavorite">0</entry>

    <entry name="Genre">WebTV</entry>

</section>

<list>

This could be served in some location, and MP could download the available defenitions.

Afterwards, the user should be able to change at least favourites in GUI, so that he can browse all stations by some Favourites=OFF options and just watch TV whithout being disturbed by several Mongolian streams while he's quite sure not to fully understand Mongol by setting Favourites=ON.

The most obvious point of improvement would be a mapped structure (just like implemented in PCZapper2MP) to the XML, while keeping the global list manageble, but in general, I'm interested in remarks.

Maybe this could be a neat start: XSPF