Flash Player Stream Info from Website

[James.M]

Does anybody here have experience loading a flashplayer interface from a website? Here's what I'm trying to do and what I have.

This is a radio stream from a local radio station. I'm trying to access the streaming playlist and the only place I can find this information is through this flash player.

The stream looks like this:

The part with "Advertisement Break" is the part that is actually Flash.

Here's what it looks like when I attempt to load it in LabVIEW:

This is what the website looks like when first opening the player, so I think I'm on the right track, but it just stops there.

I used some HTML parameters from the website to get the player settings, which can be seen below (or on the webpage) along with the source code.

I'm expecting one of your to come on and tell me it's not possible, but any help would be appreciated.

[Case_in_Point]

Hi James,

What exactly do you need the flash player in your application for? Would it be possible to embed a web browser as an ActiveX control instead of the Flash player directly? You could certainly give that a try and see if you can get things working along that direction.

Cason

Applications Engineering, National Instruments

[James.M]

Cason, thanks for the reply. I'm really just trying to scrape the streaming playlist information from the website. Embedding the webpage doesn't get me any closer to this because the Flash player is still isolating that information.

Maybe LabVIEW just isn't the way to accomplish this.

[MilanR · Accepted solution]

Hi James!

I thought this was an interesting question (and the flash player aspect gave it a little extra zest). I made a video that shows one approach to scraping web page content for use in LabVIEW.

[James.M]

Milan, thank you so much! This is exactly the info I needed.

In summary for others who find this, Milan used Chrome to see what HTTP queries the streaming site was using to access the playlist information. Then using LabVIEW HTTP Get, he was able to query for the same information. This doesn't do anything with the Flash widget, just takes advantage of the network traffic, and is therefore much easier to utilize and work with.

I wrote some code to handle my specific application, which is here. There are much more elegant ways of parsing the XML code, but I just did it with straight string parsing.

[tst]

James, there's clearly a bug somewhere - for some reason Chop Suey only appears in the array once, when it's obvious it should be in every single line.