Best Practices in W3 and TRPlayer

["T. V. Raman" <raman@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Answers/follow-ups inlined:


>>>>> "Gary" == Gary Lawrence Murphy <garym@xxxxxxxxxxx> writes:
    Gary> Now that I have trplayer and w3 working (see below), I
    Gary> have some best-practices questions:
    Gary> 
    Gary> 1) does w3-mode have a bookmark or hotlist feature?  I
    Gary> searched through the keybindings but did not find

It used to have one, but it was abandoned at some point between
4.0.40and the current version.

I end up using tab completion and the URL history list as my
bookmark mechanism at this point, backed by google for the rest,
i.e. I remember what I searched for which is not too different
from the bookmark label. 
It's definitely not an optimal solution.
W3-hot.el can be retreived from some of the older versions;
I'll put a copy under directory tvr in the emacspeak CVS area;
your mileage might vary, I tried it a while ago and it did appear
to work.

    Gary> anything -- is there some other tip or trick for saving
    Gary> a hotlist of websites?

See tip about url history and tab completion; it works
surprizingly well.

    Gary> 
    Gary> 2) what is the most speech-friendly search engine?
Google

    Gary> 
    Gary> 3) any recommendations for old-time-radio pages with
I like the OTR site, they even have a monthly newsletter.
Also, try the shoutcast url template ---C-e u shoutcast search

    Gary> real-audio content?  We've tried searching through
    Gary> google but we're getting hopelessly lost trying to
Once you find pages that you believe might have pointers to audio
    Gary> content, try hitting 'er' in W3 mode

In general, spend some time studying the tricks implemented in
the following modules:

emacspeak-url-template
emacspeak-websearch
and the various xslt filters available via the 'e' key in W3 mode

    Gary> navigate the pages we find.  In particular we would
    Gary> love to find a nice clean site featuring The Shadow,
    Gary> but if we can find a site with only the links, I can
I dont know what "the shadow " is. I'm a BBC fan myself, so
    Gary> you'll find url templates for the BBC sites.
You should be able to write your own url templates --- study the
     for the BBC and NPR and with a little bit of
     of the HTML  for sites you like, you should
     have what you want.

    Gary> build a page scraper.

the url-template mechanism will help you write such scrapers and
keep them organzied

    Gary> 
    Gary> 4) is there an easy way to add to the existing
    Gary> Emacspeak library of real-audio files?  Is there a
The easiest is to add a directory of your own in your private
     and tell emacspeak to use that as well.
It's in general hard to keep those current; typically the ones I
    Gary> listen to are the ones that still work at present.


    Gary> direct way to access these files besides dired? The
    Gary> Library directores are a great idea, but I notice most
    Gary> of the current directories are empty.
a large number of empty dirs resulted when many of the free audio
     books available from the original broadcast.yahoo.com
     site went away

    Gary> 
    Gary> 5) a developer question: I know we'll never get
    Gary> Javascript in w3 (not in _my_ life-time ;) but does
    Gary> anyone have any examples of short e-lisp scripts to do
    Gary> client-side w3 programming?  I'm thinking that one
    Gary> example might be to filter the current page through a

See some of the URL tempaltes ---and especially the emapspeak
front-end to google maps
    Gary> skeletonizer to extract the links or redisplay without
    Gary> tables.
    Gary> 
    Gary> Just for the record, and because the question does come
    Gary> up on this list, I managed to get trplayer 1.2 working
    Gary> on RedHat 9 thanks to this site:
The more important thing to do with realplayer is to 
get a command-line version written against HelixPlayer.
There is a python binding that looks tantalizingly close, but
     does not work;
what's worse, the HelixPlayer site is itself very difficult to
    Gary> navigate,
so if you have hacking cycles to donate,  focusing there would
     in the biggest bang for the buck.
The problem with the current trplayer is that it uses older
     real libs, so you 
lose on things like 5.1 audio; it also uses OSS alas, 
so you dont get to use the DMIX plugin from Alsa

    Gary> 
    Gary> http://lists.slimdevices.com/archives/developers/2004-April/008578.html
    Gary> 
    Gary> The trick posted on that page is to use RealPlayer9
    Gary> with the environment variable
    Gary> 
    Gary>    REALPLAYER_HOME="/usr/lib/RealPlayer9/users/Real"
    Gary> 
that's because it needs the older real libs see above.

    Gary> I was able to fetch trplayer using yum, so that part
    Gary> was easy, but I had to locate the RealPlayer9 RPM by
    Gary> hand ... I found it in a PBone mirror of an archive
    Gary> from Brazil!
    Gary> 
    Gary> ftp://ftp.pbone.net/mirror/cambuca.ldhs.cetuc.puc-rio.br/xine/RealPlayer9-9.0.7.151-4.i386.rpm
    Gary> 
    Gary> I then had to force the install of RealPlayer9 RPM
    Gary> because of a missing /usr/X11R6/lib/libXm.so.2 -- the
    Gary> current version is so.3 -- just in case, I copied that
    Gary> library manually from another machine, but I am not
    Gary> certain the file is needed because I could run trplayer
    Gary> before I had the lib completely copied across.
    Gary> 
    Gary> -- Gary Lawrence Murphy <garym@xxxxxxxxxxx>: office
    Gary> voice/fax: 01 519 4222723 Business Advantage through
    Gary> Community Software - http://teledyn.com "what I need is
    Gary> a job that doesn't interfere with my work" -gary murphy
    Gary> 
    Gary> -----------------------------------------------------------------------------
    Gary> To unsubscribe from the emacspeak list or change your
    Gary> address on the emacspeak list send mail to
    Gary> "emacspeak-request@xxxxxxxxxxx" with a subject of
    Gary> "unsubscribe" or "help"

-- 
Best Regards,
--raman

      
Email:  raman@xxxxxxxxxxx
WWW:    http://emacspeak.sf.net/raman/
AIM:    emacspeak
PGP:    http://emacspeak.sf.net/raman/raman-almaden.asc

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
To unsubscribe from the emacspeak list or change your address on the
emacspeak list send mail to "emacspeak-request@xxxxxxxxxxx" with a
subject of "unsubscribe" or "help"